Petrushka

It’s an intriguing choice of Christmas show for the over 5s at The Little Angel : the badly-ending tale of a sentient puppet’s unhappy life and unrequited love. Clown Petrushka loves the dancer who twirls and flirts alongside him in the puppet booth. But she only has eyes for the handsome, sequined strong-man, and rejects Petrushka’s advances, while the malevolent puppet-master plots revenge on his incorrigibly wilful clown.

Petrushka himself is a beautiful creation, gangling and mischievous, with a hint of haughty loneliness lurking behind his rouged nose and grimy joey frills. By some eerie brilliance, his clownish dance is composed of inch-perfect muscular tensions and extensions. The physical reality of this haunted, hopeless creature; the trembling leg that supports an impossible aerial arabesque; the satisfyingly weighted stamp of his gawky, gambolling love-dance, are all impeccably imagined and executed. His scarlet-frocked lady-love is commonplace by comparison, a provincial Venus with well-fleshed legs, vacantly complacent in her pirouetting. Even the moustachioed strong-man with his crowd-pleasing routine of muscle-flexing and sword-swallowing can’t compete with Petrushka’s wan intensity.

But if the puppets (designed by Lyndie Wright , manipulated by Ronnie Le Drew, Mandy Travis and Rebekah Wild) are amazing, the rest of the show isn’t without its problems. There’s far too much text, too much scene-setting, too much explanation and too many real bodies getting in the way of the puppets and their story.

Things do pick up pace in the second act, as the runaway Petrushka embarks upon a jaunt to Switzerland to ‘help’ a beleaguered Mr. Stravinsky with his efforts to write a new ballet. And here Josh Darcy, who’s far too genial to be remotely convincing as the wicked puppet-master, excels as Petrushka’s willing stooge. The unashamedly immature gags that litter this brief partnership are greeted with howls of ecstasy by the kids in the audience (who apparently prefer slapstick, silliness and the occasional blown raspberry to any amount of doomed love). But it’s doomed love they get, as we’re swept back to St. Petersburg where Petrushka plays out the final scenes of his doleful drama.

Petrushka is an ambitious conglomeration of jokes, dance, music, tragedy and magic tricks. Craftmanship and love are evident in every puppet, prop and gesture, and the show is indisputably strong on atmosphere, if – as a flurry of programme-consulting in the interval attested – less strong on clarity and focus. Will your five-year-old love it? I’m not making any promises. But I suspect that Petrushka’s uncanny dance will be staying with me for some time to come.