Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes: 10 Days on Earth

This was a curate’s egg of a performance, albeit a polka dot curate’s egg which hatched before our eyes to reveal a little duck so cute as to make Orville look like the Elephant Man / Duck. This was the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes and their latest performance, 10 Days on Earth. It was the story of a “simple” middle aged shoeshine man called Darrel who lives with his elderly mother in a creepy grand wood panelled mansion, and the 10 days he spends without realising that she has “gone to sleep in the ground”. It is intercut with the tale of Honeydog and Little Burp (the aforementioned duckling) which the Mother used to read to Darrel as a boy and which the grown Darrel is still obsessed with. Other characters include a foul mouthed tramp who thinks he is God and a ‘Salvation Army’ type lady. This was high camp gothic Americana lubricated with schmaltz.





Burkett towers over the wooden cabinet stage, not just reciting the lines, but living them; the puppets mirror his movements, or maybe he mirrors theirs; he animates by them sheer force of psychic will. In the cold light of day it is easy to quibble about the manipulative sentimentality of the plot, but what Burkett achieves, and this is the wholly grail of almost all art from the Romantic period onwards, is to allow the audience to rediscover the inner child, the wonder of discovery and amazement, to find oneself with one’s chin hanging down and tongue lolling out in delight. Burkett himself comes across like a man who has never forgotten what it was like to play with dolls as a boy; his manic dialogue threatens at times to drift out of control, or to get stuck going round the same roundabout for a while whilst his brain searches for the right exit. It is a bravura performance, intense, crazy, obsessive-compulsive, and at times astonishing. And any show which features a pigeon turning into a hot air balloon in a flash of magic is alright by me.