Mime
Bring back Marceau
Adrian Dannatt samples some of the events at the London International Mime Festival
At the end of the film Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman is striding through Central Park when he is waylaid by a mime artiste. The white-faced figure starts pretending to be a window, whereupon the irate Hoffman gives him a vicious push, knocking him to the grass. Seeing the film in New York, the previously sedate audience began to cheer, clap and howl with laughter, in raptures of wish fulfilment. For in Manhattan mime is, next to hermeneutics, the most dreaded of European cultural imports. On every street corner otherwise unemployable actors lin- ger in greasepaint, pretending to be office blocks or aeroplanes, soliciting for funds with elaborate muteness.
In Britain mime may not be a daily hazard of urban life, but it is still regarded with suspicion and distaste. Mime is Mar- cel Marceau being whimsical with an im- aginary bouquet; it is tainted with that cloying sentimentality that consistently lurks behind the surface rigours of French culture. Mime is the theatrical equivalent of those kitsch paintings in which urchins wipe away fat tears. People who perform mime tend to call themselves 'artistes' and dress like first-year drama students in colourful braces and rainbow-pattern jum- pers.
The London International Mime Festiv- al, which celebrates its tenth birthday this year, was set up with the intention of radically altering our idea of mime. It has done so by putting on a series of theatrical events involving film, avant-garde sets, rock music and sculpture, the usual gamut of post-modern theatre — everything apart from old-fashioned mime. This certainly makes for an eclectic and entertaining festival, but its connection to mime seems tenuous, if not mendacious. The problem is that among such a richness of funky spectacle as the Festival provides any traditional mime act begins to look rather dozy, in fact a bit too much like mime.
David Glass over the last ten years has built a reputation as the outstanding Brit- ish solo mime performer. Like many of those in the contemporary mime world, he is strongly influenced by Etienne Decroux, who replaced Marceau's tableaux with an emphasis on physical techniques and the stretched potential of the human form, requiring a fitness and agility, practical and mental, more reminiscent of the disciplines of modern dance. Glass is a superb and technically flawless performer, but his work seems repetitive and limited amongst the multi-media extravaganzas offered elsewhere.
Daniel Stein, an American, is another student of Decroux, and his piece Inclined to Agree was also full of poetic gesture and elegant physical metaphor. Based on lines by Emily Dickinson, it centred around a rather beautiful set, a slanted world in which table, chairs, door and window frames all leaned at a disconcerting angle. There were also silver plumb-lines, which sometimes acted as a curtain of rain, and at others were attached to mysterious weights. It was extremely elegant, like a modern art installation, and the piece likewise was brief and almost too refined. He performed some clever slapstick with David Glass performing 'Hands' an unruly metal tape measure that had a serpent-like life of its own, and at one point he even mimed looking for a door key, which was reassuring for those of us who had scant notion what his graceful movements were meant to signify.
The audience managed to find humour in the strangest places; they acted like those irritatingly smug concert-goers who chuckle mystifyingly at musical jokes which only they can detect. At one point someone behind me shouted out 'Ace!' which is the sort of exclamation favoured by mime audiences and explains why they are the major reason to avoid the art form.
If Daniel Stein was witty, minimal and balletic, Studio Hinderik, who opened the Festival, were portentous, semi- pornographic and extremely Dutch. It was also hard to grasp their connection with mime. Their show Sidewalk Edge took up most of the Shaw Theatre with an enor- mous table-top surface which could be adjusted and tilted to varying angles. This rather mediaeval device was the stage for a fractured, paedophilic love affair between a sweaty middle-aged man and a boy called David, who once, it seemed, had been in his care, a situation to alarm the most progressive of social workers.
We saw a scratchy film of David at play as an infant, then the gigantic drawing- board tilted to become a sheet of paper upon which the lover wrote. In turn it became a sidewalk, a bed, a surreal land- scape of rolling boulders. David, evidently much matured in all directions, emerged buttocks-first from a sandpit and generally caused understandable torment to his men- tor. During these gripping incidents a series of melancholy letters boomed out over the PA, detailing the minutiae of unrequited love. Though the transforma- tions of the set were visibly rewarding one section where the shifting sidewalk sprouted a towering lamp-post was particu- larly striking — it ultimately seemed rather a laborious exercise in scenic spectacle.
Dr Johnson's remark about a woman's preaching was even more applicable to Theatre de la Mandragore, who came all the way from Belgium to the ICA to stage a silent black-and-white film on the Frank- enstein theme. This was achieved with a pianist and a projectionist, both in suitable Twenties garb, and a gauze screen behind which the grey cast acted out their jerky melodrama. It was certainly effective: only the undisguisable red of their tongues suggested that they were live actors and the screen, complete with flickering scratches and subtitles, was utterly convincing.
Although undoubtedly clever, it seemed a waste of their skills at mimicry merely to reproduce a minor B-movie that only the most dedicated of silent film buffs would want to see in the cinema. If the recreated film had been a Pirandellian paradox on the nature of theatre and reality, or one of those films about filming favoured by early Hollywood, it might have had some reso- nance beyond mere technique.
Wissel Theatre, another group from Belgium, also at the ICA, not only pro- duced a show that seemed to be mainly spoken dialogue, but were also suspicious- ly un-Belgian. In fact, these three cropped- haired young men with white shirts and nerdish spectacles looked exactly like a downtown New York experimental theatre troupe, nurtured on the Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson. They spoke in American accents and played throbbing synthesiser riffs in between faux-naif patter about Patagonia, the subject of the show via Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia. The signifi- cance of the jokey dialogue and continuous clowning seemed limited to the most banal attack on cultural imperialism. The cultu- ral imperialism that forces a theatre group from Ghent to act as though they lived on the Lower East Side clearly escapes them.
The problem with the Mime Festival is not a lack of talented international acts, rather it is that they are too international, too much a part of the hybrid cosmopolitan culture of 'visual theatre' and, perhaps, simply not enough to do with mime. The Marcel Marceau revival cannot be far away.
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