Janne Cleveland

This project takes as its focus the work of Canadian theatre artist Ronnie Burkett, which continues to delight and disturb mainstream audiences nationally and internationally. There are a number of factors that set the work of Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes apart from that of other contemporary practitioners of the craft: it deviates from European-based traditions of puppetry by delivering multi-layered, text-driven productions; it presents narratives that are specifically for adult audiences–children under the age of fourteen are refused admission; and of particular interest to this thesis is that the works present a sustained critique of the cultural and moral values that underlie the contested relations of power through which subjectivity and identity are constituted. As puppetry, Burkett’s theatre practice emerges from a performance tradition that easily lends itself to questioning the power dynamics of dominant narratives and ideologies of social interaction precisely because it is typically undervalued among the arts in contemporary Western culture, and for this reason has greater license to present alternative interpretations of the psychosocial relations upon which subjectivity is dependent. I employ key Freudian and post-Freudian concepts of the abject, mourning and melancholia, the fetish, and the uncanny as well as some of the most well-established and well-recognized aesthetics and philosophies of modern drama, including Brecht’s alienation-effect, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Expressionism, Symbolism, and Cabaret through which to analyze four of Burkett’s mature works. What makes his work a particularly fertile object of study is that the anxiously fraught terrains of trauma and loss explored in the plays under discussion employ the medium of the puppet as a means of considering various aspects of the difficult negotiations of human relations and subject constitution.