Seen and Done

I’ve fallen a bit behind with my reviews, but I have to say a belated word about ‘Famous Puppet Death Scenes’ by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop from Canada. It is indeed essentially a puppet show with a series of death scenes showing off a range of jokes and ingenious stunts. You could call the style Gothic Absurd, perhaps: supposedly the sponsor, a puppet himself, has put together for our edification these celebrated death scenes, culminating in his own. The series is loosely bound together by some repeated motifs, especially a number of extracts from that seminal work The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frot.
The pieces are funny and ingenious (sometimes you may suspect a bit has found its way into the show because it’s such an amusing idea, rather than because it fits the theme brilliantly, but hey, what’s wrong with that?) and actually have some genuine shock value. You won’t expect deep philosophy, but things are rounded out with a little moral reflection, delivered as snappily as the rest. If this show or this group ever come your way, give it a try.