BILLY TWINKLE Requiem for a Golden Boy
NORTH WEST PREMIERE BY
INTERNATIONAL PUPPET PERFORMER
Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes
BILLY TWINKLE Requiem for a Golden Boy
- forming part of Manchester’s Queer Up North festival -
Fri 3 - Wed 8 April 2009
Press night, Fri 3 April, 8pm
North West Premiere
The Lowry welcomes multi award-winning performer Ronnie Burkett, Canada's foremost artist in puppet theatre and his latest production, Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy, which makes its North West debut (3 – 8 April) as part of Manchester’s Queer Up North festival.
This visit is part of an international tour which only includes four UK dates, before visiting Australia and returning to Canada. Alberta-born Ronnie Burkett is often hailed as the world's foremost artist in puppet theatre for adults. A virtuoso performer of truly astonishing talent, he writes his own scripts, creates his own marionettes, and appears onstage throughout every performance, manipulating and voicing every character. With unique wit, vision and compassion, his shows explore the full spectrum of what it means to be human.
Billy Twinkle is the story of a middle-aged cruise ship puppeteer who dazzles audiences with his Stars in Miniature marionette niteclub act. His saucy burlesque stripper Rusty titillates the tourists, octogenarian Bunny invokes sidesplitting laughter with the inflatable balloon in his pants, Bumblebear juggles and roller-skates and steals the hearts of every audience, and society dame Biddy Bantam Brewster brings a bit of highbrow hilarity to the high seas with her drunken aria. Billy is the best in the business and on top of the world as he floats along through life until he is fired by the cruiseline. Standing at the edge of the ship contemplating a watery demise, Billy is abruptly called back to reality when his dead mentor Sid Diamond appears as a hand puppet. Sid literally will not leave his side, and forces Billy to re-enact his life as a puppet show in order to remember and rekindle the passion Billy once had for puppets, people and the dream of a life that sparkles.
For anyone stuck in the middle - mid-career, mid-love, mid-life - caught between our own past and future, this requiem for a golden boy shines a little light on the wonder of youth meeting the wisdom of age with a kick in the pants to finish what we started.
The Lowry’s Walkabout long term outreach project, which aims to use creative activity to develop opportunities for participation and social engagement among Salford’s communities, is involved with this production. Members of the Walkabout team are working with Queer Up North, programming team and festival organisers, to provide opportunities for young people in puppet making. Artists will work with Salford’s Lesbian and Gay Youth Group in Kersal who will work with Ronnie Burkett, from Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes in early April on a two day intensive project. The youth group will also receive tickets to see Billy Twinkle when it appears at The Lowry.
"Ronnie Burkett allows puppets to walk the mean streets of the soul. Engagingly weird and actively perverse, it's alternative in the best sense."
- Time Out (London, UK)
"The puppets live; we share their humanity and Burkett's marionettes seem able, somehow, to convey things no mere human actor can. Or should."
- Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, Alberta)
“Ronnie Burkett is one of the geniuses of the world...seeing his troupe every few years has just become a necessity of civilized theatregoing.”
-The Village Voice, New York NY, USA
Posted on Monday, 09 March 2009 under Press Theatre Press