NEXT- Infinite Variety Show

NEXT: The Infinite Variety Show
by Lawrence Switzky

So Shakespeare dies and goes to heaven, which looks like a theatre. And Saint Peter, who resembles the great English Shakespeare director Peter Hall, is out in the audience. They both understand that this is an audition. But because Shakespeare is a puppet, he puts on a puppet show, all of his plays slimmed to a single iconic moment of around eight seconds (or 160 frames of film). He performs his complete works with a dummy, some props and some stage magic. It works; Saint Peter is won over. He says, “What fools these mortals be.” Credits.

Barry Purves’s 1989 stop-motion short, Next, is a nearly wordless treatise on puppetry and on Shakespeare’s theatre as twinned arts of lending animacy. It’s as though at the instant of death, Shakespeare clings to two forms, compressed and various, that endow objects and persons with life. (Film, the medium that reanimates that animation, quietly presides as a third.) Next advances a perverse argument for the plays as artworks that survive and flourish when they’ve been sheared of their glorious language. These compressed Shakespeares remind us how much of the drama depends on the inter-animation of persons and things, and that language is only one means of distributing liveliness. The plays become a pageant of crowns exchanged, mirrors broken, cups of sack drunk, thrusting swords, yellow garters, masks, a ring, a handkerchief, a fake bear, a blanket that suggests a fairy lover and then the brook where Ophelia drowns. Even Saint Peter has a bell that summons Shakespeare to action.

Next was the first film that Purves wrote and directed by himself after a decade working for Aardman Animation. Commissioned by Channel Four for their Lip Synch series, the brief was to compose a short piece about language. Purves, inspired by the challenge of the budget (which only allowed one complex puppet) and mime Nola Rae’s Handlet: Hamlet, a performance told with anthropomorphic hands in expressive gloves, chose to explore body language. He endows Shakespeare’s hands with unusual expressive power, little puppets on a larger puppet. Much Ado about Nothing is a heated palaver between hands that stand for Beatrice and Benedick. Donning an elaborate headdress for Antony and Cleopatra, one of puppet-Shakespeare’s hands is made to serve as an asp that bites him/her in the breast.

Those protean, improvising hands can’t help but recall the hands we don’t see between the frames, shaping, exploring, ensouling a compact and artificial world. The spirit of makeshift flows between the trunk on the puppet stage and the puppeteers in a film studio in Bristol. In Richard III, puppet-Shakespeare uses a scuttling hand to enact the murderers who creep into the Tower of London to kill his nephews. In the production studio, according to the liner notes to His Intimate Lives, the DVD collection that contains Next, Purves found two blown-up condoms to represent the princes. Puppet-Shakespeare conjures the two Dromios in The Comedy of Errors out of a clown’s nose and a mirror. In the spectacular final tableau from Cymbeline, Shakespeare descends from the sky, amid thunder and lightning, dressed as an eagle in the middle of a sunburst. That elaborate setting was fashioned out of a clock Purves found in the trash on the morning of the shoot.

In Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance, his witty and illuminating treatise on filmed puppetry, Purves insists again and again on the importance of “Letting a gesture read”: “The eye needs a few seconds to think about something before it is ready for the next image.” But much of the rough magic of Next comes from the sheer momentum with which one play, held only for one count in every eight, injects life into the next. The onrushing continuity of motion (“Next”) structures the film. The dummy Desdemona, strangled in Othello, is dismembered and baked into a pie in Titus Andronicus, and then miraculously resurrected as one of the disappointed guests at the second banquet in Timon of Athens.

These casual transformations, these moments when people become things that then become people again, this animistic whirligig, evokes the sheer promiscuity with which agency circulates between human characters and the object world in Shakespeare’s plays. In a characteristic Purves mise en abyme, puppets become the operators of other puppets; the dummy in the Macbeth scene operates a witch puppet, but the witches are themselves puppetmasters. Kenneth Gross, who has surveyed the “puppet moments” in Shakespeare’s drama, notes how frequently the plays ask us to “reflect on just how much the actors onstage, or the characters they play, control or are controlled by others, by manifest or unseen forces, invisible hands and strings.” This universal irony, one that applies to Shakespeare as much as to puppetry, does not allow us to forget how death will finally put a stop to the capacity to animate or be animated in turn. The Shakespeare of Next musters this wild spectacle as he exhausts his last puff of mortality. But that’s also not quite the end. Even in the credits, after Shakespeare has been saved and etherealized, Purves casts members of the crew (“supporting company of assorted craftsmen, bawds, spear carriers, and attendant fairies”) in roles they might play in other Shakespeare projects—Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure—after they’ve cashed their meager checks and moved on to other gigs. At the beginning of his career as an independent filmmaker, Purves seizes on Shakespeare’s example to express a puppet artist’s credo: that created motion, even stop-motion, never really ceases. In Next, Purves gives the last word to Shakespeare; and perhaps its best to give the last word on this appreciation, too, to Shakespeare in his Sonnet 18: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So
long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Lawrence SwItzky is associate professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto. His most recent publication is the collection Shakespeare’s Things: Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World in History, Theory, and Performance.