Love is a Dog from Hell

Yesterday Toblarina and I went to see Low Life, a puppet show by Blind Summit Theatre inspired by the work of Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is my favourite non-queer writer, and possibly my favourite writer of all time. A deadbeat and a drunk, he was largely unemployable and rejected most of the values of conventional society. So long as he had a roof over his head, he didn't see the point in breaking his back just to buy a nice car or keep up with the Joneses, and had no real dreams of settling down.

Instead, he spent his time in whiskey bars, trying to make good as a writer, and sustaining his income by slacking his way through a position with the post office. He greeted the world with a misanthropic glare but was never more disparaging about anyone than he was about himself.

I think I kind of expected the puppet show to act out parts of his work, but instead they took his inspiration to produce characters of their own to present their hour-long snatch of life set in a back street bar.

The first character was a non-speaking barfly who refused to be separated from his beer, then we met the cleaner who arrived for her shift and then 20 minutes later sat down to lose herself in the pages of a good novel. One of my favourites was the wide-boy cockney plumber who turned up to fix a burst pipe with lots of “ooh yeah, soon ‘ave that sorted” type of remarks.

There was no attempt made to hide the fact that these were puppets, and their controllers where not hidden, they took the part of narrators and actors who conversed with the puppets and they were all an equal part of the show. In some ways this made the puppets seem all the more real - because we weren’t being asked to accept an illusion, we forgot that there was even one present.

My favourite clip was a series of little blue men performing a spy story loosely based on Bukowski’s novel Pulp, his only non-autobiographical work. About 30 different small puppets where banged up onto the table to deliver a fast moving dialogue with a new character introduced about every 2 seconds. A masterpiece of timing and wit.

At the end we met Miranda, a fallen glamour queen who sang about her loneliness while drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. She seemed very much the kind of woman the Bukowski would have fallen for, or at least regarded as a kindred spirit.

www.blindsummit.com