Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy
Created and performed by Ronnie Burkett
Runs until October 24 @ Factory Theatre
By Jeff Maus
There’s no mention of autobiography in Billy Twinkle, but the similarities between its title character and sole performer–they’re both gay puppeteers form small prairie towns in Canada–could be significant.
In the play, Billy Twinkle is a puppeteer on a cruise ship with his production Stars in Miniature. He tells off people in the crowd, gets fired, and gets a visit from his dead mentor. The puppeteering legend takes the form of a hand puppet making him relive all manner of moments from his life in marionette form. He seems to have had a nervous breakdown. Twinkle is “middle-aged and not even at a crossroads” and struggling with being moderately successful and bored, not having even liked puppets for nine years. Burkett carries the production and delivers a realistic, relatable world.
The marionettes create a distance from the emotional experience. The show felt like a graphic novel in that way. It is not a knock against the play, but an undeniable challenge that Burkett faces head on. His ambition and technical expertise are incredible. The show opens with an elaborate marionette striptease (and closes with a reference to the difficulty of making marionettes strip.) There is wonder in seeing the puppets in the play constantly manipulating their own puppets in the varied situations. It’s classic puppetry and a classic story, but it feels incredibly modern. Similar to what a character in the play tells Billy, he has “a pretty old routine in the hands of a twisted modernist.” Aside from his mastery of the form, the limited emotional range of the marionettes is compensated for with a very well-written story and Burkett’s own animated self. Most animated when wrestling with his hand puppet.
Billy Twinkle is a raw and honest play, with much of it based on true experiences. All of it is artificial and handmade, except for the man at the centre of it (though plastic surgery is a dream of Twinkle’s.) A two-hour, intermission free puppet play would not appeal to some people, but this performance, script and technical skill combine at a high level that makes it is easy to appreciate.
