When you get a new car, it is always amazing how many other cars the same as yours you start to see on the roads. They were always there. You just didn’t notice them before. It’s much the same with illness: develop a mysterious and terrifying sounding pilo-nidal sinus on your back and discover that all your friends and relatives already know it’s just a doctor’s word for ‘pressure sore’. Hobbies too: get into candle-making or coin collecting and join the three billion others who are.
I knew nothing of Ronnie Burkett before seeing Billy Twinkle Requiem For A Golden Boy at the Barbican in the Silk Street Theatre and my experience of non-Punch-and-Judy puppet shows began and ended with thinking Being John Malkovich was a great film that went on a bit. Ronnie Burkett is a Canadian master marionettiste who writes, directs, builds all the puppets and sets for and does all the voices in his incredible shows which are emphatically not for children. Feeling inadequate yet? You will be after seeing him in action for 105 minutes without a break.
Billy Twinkle is a semi-autobiographical fable about Burkett’s life in puppetry in which he mourns his own lost innocence and the death of his mentor. It is funny and sad, inspiring and depressing, cynical and naïve all at the same time. Sometimes Burkett joins his creations on stage as a character in his own drama and sometimes his puppets become puppeteers themselves, complete with their own miniature marionettes as Burkett skilfully manipulates and subverts theatrical convention to serve his story.
It is difficult to describe how good the puppets are and the writing and acting are not too far behind either. If it all sounds too good to be true then get down there quick in your new car; you’re probably the only person you know who hasn’t heard of Theatre of Marionettes.
Billy Twinkle Requiem For A Golden Boy was at Silk Street Theatre, Barbican Centre until 28 March.
