PUPPET LOVE

"I make him watch when I have sex. I get him to buy drugs for me and I use him to do robberies in the middle of the night . . . but other than that it's a pretty normal relationship."
Voyeurism, vice, and violence: welcome to the world of David Strassman, ace ventriloquist, and living proof that a puppet's not just for Christmas. Strassman and his compliant doll-child are bringing their formidable double-act to Dublin's HQ later this month for a show that promises to jazz up this generally unhip art form.
When one thinks of puppetmasters, unwelcome images come to mind of irritating green ducks singing saccharine ballads on Saturday night variety shows or Jimmy Saville being beaten to within an inch of his life by Rod Hull's bloody EMU . . . which just left you wishing the damn bird had gone the extra inch.
Strassman, though, does not patronize his audience. Instead, we're confronted by a foul-mouthed adolescent malcontent whose only saving grace is that in not being made of human flesh, he doesn't suffer from acne. Chuck, for that is his name, is the central attraction of Strassman's collective dummy-run, the cast also including a trio of miniature robotic dinosaurs who mime flawlessly to Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' . . . air-guitar solo included. And offsetting Chuck's misanthropic malevolence is Ted E. Bear, a cuddly but insecure, well, teddy bear.
"The great thing about my characters is that they grow nightly on stage," says Strassman, down a phone-line from Australia. "I do improvisation. What I've done is I've given my characters the same parameters that actors have in a play: they all have the same hopes, dreams, fears, neuroses, objectives, conflicts . . . and so they're all so well thought-out that when you leave the venue, people forget it was a one man show! They think it's an ensemble cast."
In Strassman's view, ventriloquists should be more than just stand-up comedians with rubber props.
"The show I'm bringing to HQ," explains Strassman, "is the first time that my show has a definitive story-line: a beginning, a middle and a Twilight Zone-type end. I just did it in Edinburgh for the festival last August and I'm really creatively in a place that I've been dreaming to be. This show in Dublin precedes my run on Broadway and my television series in the U.S."
With such prestigious venues on his CV, it seems the American comic has overcome any prejudices people may have harboured towards the species of humanus ventriloquis.
"Every ventriloquist in the world is either playing a cruise ship or a birthday party. I'm the only one doing legitimate theatre in legitimate venues. I usually travel with 120 lighting instruments and 55 sound cues. What bothers people about your average ventriloquist is that they stand there with their stupid-looking puppet and a bow-tie and they tell jokes. There's no depth to the character."
The last puppet-show your correspondent saw involved a bloke called Punch beating the inner stuffing out of that poor wench, Judy. Domestic violence may not be high on the agenda of Strassman's show, but there are strong psychological undercurrents of violence running through his act all the same.
"What I do is I take all the fears that everybody's ever had about a puppet and amplify them: that they'll kill you and take your soul. 'So where do you get your clothes, Chuck?'. 'From a dead child'. I like sick shit like that."
Despite all the lights, FX and fancy robotics, Strassman maintains that his state-of-the-art puppet-show is merely the icing on a cake that has been in the oven since mankind started baking.
"The first object of art that was ever excavated by archaeologists was a figurine of a human," asserts Strassman. "What I'm trying to say is that miniature representations of ourselves fascinate, and have always fascinated, human beings."
Indeed, from Gulliver's Travels to Toy Story, there's always been a market for yarns concerned with pixies, dwarves, midgets, elves, gnomes and Danny DeVito. But after bringing such a level of sophistication to the form, where can Strassman go from here? Or can he take Chuck to beyond infinity?
"Somebody recently mentioned to me that there's no women in my show and I thought 'yeah, they're right'," muses Strassman. "So I thought about that for a while. Chuck is 13 years old; he's full of pubescent immaturity. But his angst comes not so much from the absence of a female partner in the show as from the fact that he knows he's a puppet - he hates it. He wants to motor around and do the things that a real boy can do. That's the objective and conflict in the show. I've broken that fourth wall."
Do you ever get fed up with Chuck? Would you leave him on the shelf when you go on holiday?
"Fuck, yeah!" says Strassman. "You can't bring a puppet out by a campfire. I go to the British Virgin Islands by the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; the Simpson desert here in Australia; Alaska; south-west America . . . as far away from him as I can get!"
One of the most memorable moments of the show is when Strassman leaves the stage after a spat with Chuck, only for the puppet to come alive and start speaking and moving on his own. It's positively freaky when you first see it, and it marks Strassman out as a pioneer of the artform, as Chuck is the first puppet who can function without sitting at his master's right hand. Strassman explains how the innovation came about.
"In 1985, I woke up one morning and said to myself , 'oh my God, I'm a ventriloquist; I better shoot myself in the head or quit'. So I quit. I mean, I wasn't doing anything different.
"So one night, when I was really pissed with a friend of mine, we figured out how to put the remote control into Chuck to make him come alive. The only problem, though, was the manually-worked clutch, which works the same way like that in a car.
"So I got on to a friend of mine who worked in NASA who was a machinist who turned high precision metals and plastics for statellites. He figured how to do it. But since he had to work during the day, we sneaked in one night into NASA and crept past all these Einsteinian blackboards with all these calculations on them and we machined this part.
"And once I did the bit where Chuck comes alive, I realised I had added a new element - theatre - to my show."
So there you have it: the best puppet show in town, no strings attached.
David Strassman plays HQ at the Irish Music Hall Of Fame for a limited run beginning on Thursday, March 23rd. Tickets are available from the usual outlets priced #15. Box office: tel. 8783345.