Penny Plain
August 2013
Canada’s Ronnie Burkett, an award-winning, world renowned master of puppetry, is bringing Penny Plain to Melbourne for an exclusive Australian season.
The work is a beautifully dark apocalyptic political comedy that tells the tale of Penny Plain and the visits to her boarding house of a cast of unlikely characters after she has just heard that the end of the world is coming.
These include a serial killer, a cross-dressing banker, talking dogs and mysterious strangers who are all seeking sanctuary. And while Plain may be blind, in the process she hears and learns much about mankind.
“This will be my sixth tour to Australia, mostly to Melbourne, so I feel that audiences there already know what to expect of my work,” Burkett confidently says. “And because I’m often touring, I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms thinking up the next idea. You never know where that is going to come from and while Penny Plain’s origins coincided with the Mayan end of the world stuff, it really had nothing to do with that.
“It actually came about due to me watching that great Canadian scientist David Suzuki on television while I was growing up. Then someone interviewed him quite recently and asked if the world will survive. Suzuki bluntly said that the world would certainly survive, but its inhabitants wouldn’t.
“That started me thinking because Suzuki’s response was just so chilling,” he continues. “If people just got out of the way, the earth would do quite well. So that was the beginnings of Penny Plain and I then worked with the idea that as people started to disappear, the garden, quite literally, would begin to come back to life.
“The biggest thing that stumped me for months and months was that I had to come up with a reason for the world to be ending,” Burkett reveals with a laugh. “But there was always news of all kinds of different disasters happening, such as banks collapsing, or about to happen, such as pandemics spreading around the globe. I just thought I’d get them to take place all at once. But that’s all implied.
“It’s had a tremendous response because while it’s quite surreal and somewhat odd, it’s also very funny. If you add all those elements together – there are talking dogs and a couple of purely comic characters – then it becomes something that is very approachable for an audience. There’s also a lot of tenderness In Penny Plain.”
The openly gay, 56-year-old puppeteer, who won a regional Emmy Award in 1979 for his skills on Cinderrabbit that had aired on America’s PBS, became fascinated in the art-from from an early age.
“At age seven, I randomly opened an encyclopaedia and it fell open at a two-page spread on puppets,” Burkett concludes. “So the family joke is that it could have just have easily opened on proctology. But, no, it opened on puppetry and I just went from there.”
Penny Plain shows at Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio, from Thursday, August 8 until Sunday, August 18 at 8pm
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