“The Fat Clown at the Circus and Other Plays for Puppets” by Christopher Hurley

Whimsical, preposterous, ingenuous, and ambiguous describe the contents of The Fat Clowns at the Circus and Other Plays for Puppets, by Christopher Hurley, director of the Manitoba Puppet Theatre. The book includes a preface composed by Mr. Hurley in the manner of a social diatribe, eleven seemingly unrelated stories “devised by the Manitoba Puppet Theatre and five hundred children at Britannia Elementary School in Winnipeg” that are incorporated into the title play, “The Fat Clowns at the Circus,” a biographical note about W. William Burnham Woods, the author of the final two plays, an anti-realist domestic tragedy entitled “People Can’t Help Sneezing” (a tidy play for and about puppets in about four scenes) and “The Blade and the Bird.”

The settings and characterizations in the plays are dominated by whimsy, possibly because of the co-authorship of hundreds of school children. Some typical characters living in these plays include a lady who sleeps without pyjama bottoms in a tent in a public park (incidentally, her pyjama bottoms are stolen by a bear who wears them on his head and dances—are these children psychologically tuned in to Marian Engel?), a contestant for Miss Canada Ugly whose most fulfilling activity is picking other people’s noses for them, a man called Whitey who threatens to cut kids’ legs off for stepping on his petunias, a lady who eats kids for supper, “Mean Man”, who while sailing to Saskatchewan bumps into a farmer whom he tries to drown, but is himself drowned by the combined efforts of the farmer and a policeman.

The violence suggested in some of these characterizations mirrors the themes of the last two plays in the book, themes that are summed up in the final statement to the audience: “Psalm 37, Verse 2: For they shall be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.” The degree of irony which exists between what Mr. Hurley sets out to accomplish in his introductory comments and what has been accomplished by that final statement is preposterous. Initially, he states that “A puppet is a sign.” He goes on to say that,

Teaching puppetry to children is an effort to broaden and supply perspectives, to clarify resulting actions, and to re-apply new perspectives gained from action … Children like puppets because through them they are able to ‘act out’ and thereby personalize problems that concern them. In a kind of sub-creation they experiment with ideas that in social life are rigidly determined. Puppetry is a laboratory in which a child is safe to risk hypothesis and juxtaposition. His reward is discovery and understanding. Children like puppets because puppets set them free.

I wouldn’t quarrel with these statements; the goals inherent in them are admirable and laudable. What is arguable, however, is whether the material which follows is consistent with those statements and goals. Some of it is. “The I don’t Know Brothers” and “The Lady in the Park and Her Pyjamas” are primarily pure fun and imaginatively appealing. But I wonder what will be the nature of their discoveries and understanding from stories like “The Sixty-Dollar Rabbit”, where the characters are collectively guilty of greed and avarice, the “disgusting” satire in “The T.V. Show”, the mistrust and fear of”The Sad Story of John and Bertha”, and the inanities of “The Interview”.

I also wonder for whom the book is intended. Potential readers come to mind; schoolteachers, parents interested in developing their children’s creative energies, children interested in puppetry and people who conduct courses in puppetry. However, Mr. Hurley seems to isolate his goals from the goals of most teachers with such generalities as ” … children as a group are victims of oppression … The main agents of oppression are the electronic media, parents, and the school system … In elementary schools children are dominated and regimented by teachers who know the answers to all the questions they ask… Elementary school methods of control by fear are not possible … In schools, children are not coinvestigators but receptacles to be filled up with bits of information. Teachers present students with pre-digested subject matter … ” and so on. Parents are brushed aside in similar fashion. Children would enjoy the fast-paced action of the various vignettes, but would find little assistance in making the puppets or constructing the stages that are mentioned. The book seems fairly restricted, then, to people teaching puppetry who already know how to construct puppets and puppet theatres.

Those teachers and parents who sympathize with the general intent of Mr. Hurley’s preface, which is to emphasize the creative potential inherent in puppetry and to show how children can benefit from its practice, may be able to overlook his diatribe against the school and family and enjoy the ingenuous dialogues in many of the plays. This guilelessness is evident in such passages as the following from “The Lady in the Park and her Pyjamas”:

What a situation! What a situation! You spend all week teaching Grade 7 in some school where they just don’t care. Then you drive all the way up from Winnipeg in your beat-up old car. And what happens when you come to the park where people are supposed to be nice and kind and where nothing is ever suposed to go wrong? I’ll tell you what happens … Somebody steals your blessed pyjama bottoms!

Interjected between the eleven stories which comprise the bulk of “The Fat Clowns at the Circus” and the final two plays, “People Can’t Help Sneezing” and “The Bird and the Blade”, is a biographical note concerning the author of the latter, W. Woods, “the name taken by W. William Burnham Woods so that he could write puppet plays.” It describes the origins of the two plays in two pages of humorous, fragmented sentences: “Member discovered mouldering manuscript wrapped about remarkably preserved chunk of 110-year-old American cheddar cheese, left over from Georgia campaign … Only two W. Woods puppet manuscripts survive. Others were used to wrap meats.” The reader is left to ponder whether the remaining two should not have gone the way of their fellows.

Sharon Wieler is the Department Head at J.H. Bruns Collegiate in Winnipeg and is the Chairperson of the English Curriculum Committee for Saint Boniface.