Penny Plain: Burkett tackles the apocalypse as his legendary boarding house becomes a haven away from homophobic, anti-semitic, racists and intolerant nasties of all kinds
Ronnie Burkett and Ms Penny Plain.
Ronnie Burkett’s puppet vision of the world has evolved enormously since it first began 25 years ago. One of his earlier works, Awful Manors (1990), the first of his performances we saw at the NAC, and that shocked a lot of people, revealed a finely crafted, campy, extremely naughty activist puppet family raging against racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and intolerance of all kinds. Feeding off serious literary and theatrical erudition, his work was, and still is, a completely new phenomenon on the theatrical scene.
Penny Plain shows to what extent the stage vision and puppet manipulation have grown immensely whereas the textual part of the show seems to be having problems. Still focussed on controversial current debates, this marionette theatre, is now tackling the destruction of our planet, suggesting that a new world order is in the making. Burkett has now shown us his own personal cosmogony which is an intriguing step in a new direction.