Theatre Record

At the Back

Can You Hear Me Miming Again?

If I'm more allergic to anything than Marcel Marceau's silent followers, it's clowns. Regular attendance at the London International Mime Festival (LIMF) has cured me of the first allergy, and this year's event may well have alleviated the second. There was a strong sense of deja vu about the 2011 edition, with more sightings of a number of favourites, but one or two newcomers made their impact too.

Toilet humour

The opening show saw the return of Spain's Teatro Corsario, whose Aulidos in 2008 was a riotously filthy fairy tale. This year's La Maldicón De Poe, a conflation of some works by Edgar Allen Poe, went for horror rather than filth, with some toilet humour thrown in, and as such was something of a disappointment. The puppets were as attractively bizarre as before, with a splendid homicidal ape just shading a cat and a dog for the honours, but the story was basically weak, giving the impression that the company were treading water — almost literally, since they seized a rather incongruous opportunity to present another underwater scene based on the one that was such a feature of Aulidos.

Next up were St Petersburg clowns Akhe Engineering Theatre, or at any rate the founding pair, Maksim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko, making their fourth appearance at LIMF with Gobo. Digital Glossary. Akhe are an acquired taste, and a full house at the ICA showed just how many Londoners have acquired it. Their partisanship meant that another exercise in treading water was rapturously received. I've seen much better (and indeed much worse) from Akhe, so was not particularly taken by the sight of these two gents wandering about the stage igniting various archaic set pieces with the aid of a modern vocabulary of lasers and shaky video. "Akhe works with text as an object and creates performances that are true ritual," gushes the programme. Not for me this time, chaps, and the unveiling of a banner reading Justice at the show's end offered a political dimension to the evening that could hardly be called deserved. Worse was to come from Swiss clowns Compagnie 2+1, showing a parade of some of the hoariest routines of the clown repertoire in La Porta. Saving graces were some adequate musical interludes and an impressive opening, in which they arrived as headless, trilby-wearing nobodies in raincoats — but oh, the naff juggling, the predictable pratfalls...

Nuclear catastrophe

Then a welcome discovery: Geoff Sobelle and Charlotte Ford won a Fringe First last year with Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, which they originally staged in Philadelphia in 2008. It's set in the abandoned offices of a food company, where two employees, the terminally shy Sobelle and the gawkily predatory Ford, continue to ignore what must have been a nuclear catastrophe in a desperate pretence of work, blissfully unaware of the plant and animal life increasingly encroaching on the building. In spite of his best efforts to avoid her advances, the pair finally come together (literally, from the sound of it) in a ferocious bout of coupling in a skip. Meanwhile, the various animals, including a visiting bear, provide hilarious distraction. "I didn't get it," complained one of the younger members of the audience on the way out. Nor did I, and I didn't mind a bit, having passed an hour in almost continuous laughter. You don't need to get it, kid.

Two more evenings of miniature manipulation were almost equally disappointing. I wasn't thrilled by Patrick Sims' 2009 appearance with a marionette manifestation based on his hero Alfred Jarry, and his new piece, Hilum, presented now by Les Antliaclastes, made even less of an impression. In fact I can remember little of it, apart from the beautiful cabinet of curiosities that opened to reveal the marionettes at the beginning and the four white-clad puppeteers who took their bow at the end. Yet I swear I was awake. And while Faulty Optic's Flogging A Dead Horse did actually contain a scene that lived up to its title, and was full of enjoyably wacky invention, it too failed to say very much, and what it did seemed indulgently repetitive, as its two performers, Gavin Glover and Philip Bosworth, engaged in a series of overlong pseudo-scientific experiments in their lunar laboratory.

Symbolism

The Venetian collective Anagoor brought a very polished short piece, Tempesta, which used a most effective sound score and a couple of large video screens to supplement their meditation, through two actors and a curtained cube, on Giorgione's painting of the same name. There have been many conjectures on the symbolism of the painting, which shows a man in armour facing a naked woman in a stormy landscape. The two performers, with telling video support, link the picture with the desolation facing the Veneto today. The painting itself is not shown, which might seem a loss, but in fact studying it serves only to complicate the possible symbolism: what we do not see in Anagoor's presentation is that the woman has a child at her breast.

The festival's two big shows were both from French companies. Aurelien Bory's Compagnie 111 are regular visitors, most recently with their superb Franco-Chinese giant Tangram, Les Sept Planches De La Ruse. Once again Bory takes a very simple starting point, this time a huge industrial robot (one of the first, acquired second-hand) to deliver just over an hour of moving magic. The robot wakes, under its huge bin-liner covering, and for a while all we see is its restless, balletic movement. Finally unveiled by two actor-acrobats, it plays power games with them (and the platform on which it stands) as a fully fledged character, with the only verbal intervention a brief nod to 2001's computer, Hal-9000. In a remarkable final tableau, the bin-liner becomes a drop curtain, through which the robot punches its own way to the stars. Beautiful, scary, built with brilliant precision.

Mathurin Bolze's Compagnie MPTA were even more ambitious, their five performers struggling with a recalcitrant flying platform in Du Goudron Et Des Plumes. If Anagoor borrow from Giorgione, MPTA seem to take Gericault's Raft Of The Medusa as their inspiration, but while Bory provokes deep musings about our mechanised society, Bolze offers little more than a blank, storm-tossed canvas and some remarkable gymnastics — though to be fair the Barbican crowd lapped it up with a genuine standing ovation, something the QEH denied to Bory.

Plastic greenhouse

Two pairs of clowns brought me great pleasure to finish the festival — and a grudging acceptance that they can be both funny and modern. What distinguished both Lefeuvre & Andre's Le Jardin and Paolo Nani & Krist Jan Ingimarsson's The Art Of Dying was that they employed talents beyond simple falling-over clown skills. Lefeuvre & Andre set their piece in a plastic greenhouse, about which they can clamber grotesquely and in which they can find plenty of material for juggling and manipulation. Their two characters, one dominant, the other lazy and compliant, are essential to the business they develop in what is a very tightly conceived, very funny show. Its rhythms are also a key feature, starting with all the time to kill of a lazy summer afternoon and building to a crazy chase scene, culminating in a cheeky striptease in which Mr Lazy shows great skill keeping a strategic newspaper in place. Nani & Ingimarsson have a more conventional setting, onstage and backstage for a clown performance, but use it to display a brilliant sense of timing, particularly in their handling of the objects which are all around to torment them, from mobiles to milkjugs. Perhaps they do not achieve quite the pathos they intend in the show's development — after all, the question they set themselves to answer is "How does a clown face death?" — but they come satisfyingly close, and generate gales of unforced laughter on the way. Once again it was a pleasure to see two such clearly defined characters. I shall approach clown performances with a less heavy heart in future.