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CALGARY HERALD
REVIEW—The Last Supper of Antonin Carême
By Bob Clark
Friday January 30, 2004
Puppets cook up visual feast
Cooking in a time of chaos leads on to glory and regret for the title character in Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s The Last Supper of Antonin Carême.
The 80-minute show, which opened Thursday at the Big Secret Theatre, offers an original and imaginative recipe for mixing one man’s culinary fervour and ambition with the excesses of the French Revolution to create insight into what it means to be an artist in an inartistic age.
Mostly without dialogue and relying on their unerringly detailed way with striking hand-and-headgear puppetry, the Old Trout performers – Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes, Steve Pearce and Judd Palmer – tell their version of the sketch life of the 19th-century culinary icon know today as “the world’s first celebrity chef.”
The play opens with the boy Antonin abandoned by his father on a bridge outside the gates of Paris during the Reign of Terror. Taken in by a cook , the future “Cook of Kings” gets his humble start in the profession, as a kitchen boy. But one night after his master has gone to bed, the lad opens the door of opportunity on the untapped world of gastronomic delight and begins to write the cookbooks and create the confections that will take him away from the heavenly kitchen and into the world beneath.
This outside world, with its swine-like citizens of the revolution, is depicted on a little set contained in the façade of a large altar hat is part of the large kitchen overlooking it – an ingenious and softly –lit design that reinforces the religious allegory framing the play.
Sound effects too play a big role in the work – things like creaking oven doors, squeaky corks and horking old men.
But it’s the puppets themselves and their movements that make the biggest impression. From the graceful and priest-like cook as he prepares and then kneads the dough for his precious loaves of bread to the tusked and sinister Robespierre clone spying on the kitchen and its inhabitants, to little Antonin himself wearing an impassive Buster Keaton like face – they all come to miraculous life.
EDMONTON JOURNAL
REVIEW—The Last Supper of Antonin Carême
by Liz Nicholls
Saturday April 10, 2004
Up the revolution and those who forge it in meringue
The glorious smell of baking bread wafts over us, and over the puppet kitchen where a chef and his hollow-eyed apprentice are making the miracle of the flour, water, and salt happen in The Last Supper of Antonin Carême.
It takes a rarefied sense of the humble, and the grand, to look into the kitchen and find there an allegory for human ambition. But then, there’s something about the Old Trout imagination that’s triggered by vast metaphysical questions, channeled into a diminutive cast of characters in their miniature world. The divine gift of virtuosity, the yearning to vault past human limitations, probabilities, and needs….as realized in the giddy architecture of spun sugar and pastry (and cedar-headed puppets who live and breathe). It’s so crazy, and so perfect.
Specifically, Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop has lit on the sort of Antonin Carême. France’s greatest chef, grand-pere of French classical cuisine, and the architect of Roman ruins, Greek temples, Venetian palaces in meringue and pastry, arrived in Paris as an urchin, abandoned by his father at the city gates.
The Revolution, with its rather decisive rejection of “let them eat cake” in favour of bread for all, is in full rage when young Carême finds himself apprenticed to an elderly baker (at the sign of Le Dernier Diner, the last supper) who’s also taken in an aristocrat. The latter emerges from his closet behind the copper posts to tempt Carême with visions, not of staff-of-life artisan loaves (with their New Testament accretions) but of extravagant, decadent desserts: decorative homages to the creative impulse, and another sort of hunger to be satisfied. Carême sets to work: his debut creation out of the oven isn’t a baguette, its’ a meringue winged angel.
If the aristocrat is a white-wigged devil, the revolutionary hordes are rampaging snout-faced beasts: a tri-colour three-headed one-piece “horde,” actually. The tusk-faced, bloody-mouthed Robespierre is a menacing, gruesome figure. All are stopped in their tracks by the declaration of free will in Carême’s defiant, politically suspect artifice.
As you will glean, the puppets are radically different from Ronnie Burkett’s exquisite marionettes. For one thing, they’re “worn” by the puppeteers as head-dresses, which leaves the human hands free to work the dough. Sometimes a puppet will have four hands. They’re grotesque, stylized, distorted, and highly expressive. The text is virtually wordless, save the odd “vive la révolution!” but the show reverberates with amplified Foley sounds (designer: Peter Moller). The surreal soundscape echoes the senses on high alert in every popped cork, every cough, slammed door, approaching footstep, sniff of the air.
Like all puppeteers, the Trouts play with scale. Á la Carême’s own bizarre pieces montées (including his climactic Tower of Babel centrepiece, inspired by Breughel), the characters live in an elaborately framed red puppet theatre that is a work of art, and opens through a painting. The stage is two-layered, with the lower a tiny, therefore more panoptic, street version of what goes on in close-up above. When a door creeks open below, a looming Robespierre enters above.
What emerges in this very strange, elliptical piece, set against the backdrop of a bloody time, isn’t so much a narrative, though there are certainly narrative bits and pieces. It’s much too leisurely and elusive for that. What you get, I think, is a dark sense of the absurdity, maybe even the existential futility, of our mortal need to surpass the essence of things, an appetite for the beautiful, the ridiculous, and the impossible.
Carême, the culinary obsessive who dies doubting, is an artist. And so are the men who made this show.
