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THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Puppetry with no strings attached
By REBECCA CALDWELL
Friday, February 7, 2003 - Print Edition, Page R9
REVIEW
The Unlikely Birth of lstvan
Written by The Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Co-directed by Dave Lane and Coral Larsen Thew
Performed by Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes, Judd Palmer and Steve Pearce
At Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace
Rating: ****
Admittedly most people hear the word puppet show and are willing to start recataloguing their old copies of Maclean's to avoid seeing a performance. Well, it's time to shelve the prejudices with the periodicals. The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, an inspired offering from the Calgary-based troupe The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, is a wonderfully innovative delight.
At a fundamental level, the show is a surrealist fairy tale about good and evil, creation and destruction -- all the degrees of human experience, only from a puppet point of view.
On an elaborate set that looks like a European palazzo as imagined by Mr. Dressup, an epic battle is waged by two puppets whose neighbouring territories are marked by banners reading This and That. The sensitive That lives in the aesthetic and visual: He's an artist (whose real creations are one of the show's highlights) who paints the flowers in the courtyard. His rival, the thuggish This, is more corporeal and oral -- he eats the flowers That is trying to paint.
Wearing the puppets like crowns, the puppeteers' faces are hidden by the puppets, costumes; they've essentially become papier-mache, wood and cloth extensions of the operators. The human-puppet fusion comes in handy: Not a word is spoken and yet the puppeteers are masters at conveying emotion with a mere arm gesture or head tilt, be it the heartache of That over the loss of a flower or the slow anger of This when thwarted by That.
The Unlikely Birth of Istvan is rich in sight gags and puns, and just when you think you've seen the extent of puppet creativity, That embarks on the covert rescue operation of an Italian opera-crooning pig. But there's also imagery to spare here, if occasionally it's easier to look at than understand. A female puppet (who, it must be said, bears a striking resemblance to Cher) provides a healing, unifying influence on This and That. Her home is behind a locked door Centre stage, and how the flesh-coloured walls magically transform a giant womb into the titularly promised birth is a charming puzzle.
As with every good fairy tale, there's a heart of disturbing darkness. From the opening scene where a puppet emerges from a pair of splayed foam legs to the recurring appearance of the black-robed, long arm of Death, the birth-death tug-of-war is always present.
And unless you think your children can stand to bear witness to puppet murder (and I don't mean the oh-so-ironic escapades on the TV show Puppets Who Kill, but a good old-fashioned puppicide by strangling), the show is probably best for adults.
The Unlikely Birth of Istvan continues through tomorrow as part of the Six Stages Theatre Festival. For information call 416-504-7529.
Original Article
TORONTO STAR
Dual puppets for adults only
ROBERT CREW
ARTS WRITER
REVIEW
Feb. 6, 2003
The Unlikely Birth Of Istvan
By The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Alberta. Directed by Dave Lane and Coral Larsen Thew. Until Feb. 7 at Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, 16 Ryerson Ave. 416-504-7529.
The set is a large, round, flower-strewn playhouse that occupies most of the stage at Theatre Passe Muraille's Backspace.
Inside this colourful cartoon of a playhouse live two puppets with heads flattened out like landing strips.
One is called This and he's all mouth, a walking appetite who devours everything he can get his teeth into, starting with the aforementioned flowers and moving on from there.
This inhabits a sort of moat area below the tower-like room of his counterpart, who as you might expect, is named That. The spiritual one of the pair, That has large eyes, bushy eyebrows and likes to paint flowers and fruit.
The Unlikely Birth Of Istvan , which opened Tuesday night as part of the continuing Six Stages festival, is one of the wildest, wackiest most inventive puppet shows you're ever likely to see.
Call it the Muppets meet the Munsters, although it is definitely not suitable for children.
It begins with a rather graphic puppet birth, traces the joint life of This and That, ends in tragedy, then begins all over again.
Right from the start the body represented by This and the spirit that is That are in conflict with one another. That is awoken by a very animated alarm clock — his kettle also has a life of its own — gets up to smell the flowers and takes one off to his studio to paint. This comes along and eats all the rest of the flowers.
Enter a pig. A singing and dancing pig.
This captures the pig, ties it up, puts on his chef's hat and gets out the pepper grinder. That swoops down with his Pig Rescue Kit — a lovely sequence.
But there's no denying This and the pig's demise is gory. Then, just when it seems as if a reconciliation between the two is possible, That spots the late pig, ready for the table with an apple stuffed in its mouth.
To cut a short story even shorter, it all goes to show that This and That can't live with each other and can't live without each other.
The whole piece is staged and executed with panache by the Alberta-based Old Trout troupe. The puppets perch on top of their handlers' heads, with hand-to-hand manipulation by scrambling puppeteers Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes, Judd Palmer and Steve Pearce.
A more unusual way to explore the duality of mind and body would be hard to imagine.
But it works. This is a show that emphatically brings home the bacon.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
These puppets are rated R
REVIEW
by MARTIN MORROW
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
Written, conceived, designed and constructed by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop
Directed by Dave Lane and Coral Larsen Thew
At One Yellow Rabbit, in Calgary
Rating: ***
Casey and Finnegan it ain't. The Unlikely Birth of Istvan by Calgary's Old Trout Puppet Workshop opens with the image of a shiny pink puppet baby being expelled from between the spread legs of its marionette mother, only to have its vine-like umbilical cord snipped by the grim hand of Death with a pair of pruning shears.
And that's just the first of many indelible visuals in this weird and wonderful little puppet fable, which owes more to Hieronymus Bosch than to Jim Henson.
In the course of 55 wordless minutes, the fledgling Old Trout troupe serves up moments by turn comic, macabre and sublimely surreal: A couple of quarrelling puppets duke it out in slo-mo in a violent brawl that Punch himself might envy; a pig is butchered in a terrifying parody of Hitchcock in which nothing is seen but the flashes of a meat cleaver and the splashes of blood on a blank painter's canvas; a white moon quietly rises, which on closer inspection turns out to be a floating fetus in its amniotic sac.
Then there are the puppets themselves, an intriguing cast of characters that range from a cute porker and a Botticelli angel to a pair of lugubrious-looking bald men whose whale-shaped craniums recall nothing so much as the huge, disembodied head on crutches in the Salvador Dali painting Sleep. And speaking of heads, the Old Trout performers use theirs quite literally. No strings for these puppet masters; instead they wear their puppets like a series of bizarre hats-cum-masks and operate the limbs with rods.
There is a story here, of sorts, all about life and death and yin and yang and a character called the Monkey of Revelation -- just the sort of thing you'd expect from a band of hippie puppeteers who cooked up this show while living together in a one-room shack on the prairies. In fact, it probably makes more sense after you've had a few tokes on a joint.
The two aforementioned bald men are That and This. The former is a sensitive artist type who lives in a garret and paints pictures of flowers and fruit. The latter, his downstairs neighbour, is a voracious hedonist who keeps eating the artist's models. They carry on a running feud while, in a subplot, a forlorn newborn finds itself picked on by Death and comforted by a ministering angel. It all ends in the birth of the Istvan of the title, whose fleshy appearance requires an addition to the show's warning of "puppet nudity" -- "and human nudity, too."
The play didn't make much sense to me the first time I saw it, at One Yellow Rabbit's High Performance Rodeo festival last winter. But it scarcely matters. At this point Old Trout is so new that you remain entranced just by its novel designs and technique and those striking little vignettes.
The seven-member troupe is led by puppeteer Judd Palmer, an escapee from the Disney and YTV factories, and includes a ragbag collection of talents, from choreographers to cabinet-makers. The show is co-directed by Dave Lane and Coral Larsen Thew. The puppets are operated by Palmer, Peter Balkwill, Steve Kenderes and Steve Pearce, who make their entrance in balaclavas, red underwear and kneepads, looking like a cross between the Flying Wallendas and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
You half expect them to begin forming a human pyramid, but instead they delicately place a scratchy LP on a handmade gramophone -- a laughably earnest instructional disc for teaching your children the facts of life. That's the cue for a bizarre musical score that is a show unto itself.
The shabby-genteel, Old World atmosphere of the show is a bit like the ersatz Eastern European milieu of puppet king Ronnie Burkett's Tinka's New Dress. These artists aren't yet at the level where they can pull off an epic-sized work like Tinka or his brilliant Street of Blood, but it took Burkett a while, too.
I can't wait to see what's down the road. A puppet Peer Gynt perhaps?
Until Nov. 25 at the Big Secret Theatre in the Calgary Arts Centre; 403-264-3224.
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