Clowning Glories

Slava Snowshow

Sadler’s Wells at the Peacock Theatre, 1997

The roots of Slava Polunin’s modern brand of clowning stretch all the way back to the days of the medieval Mystery Play when comic shepherds and rustics provided interludes of light relief in the bible story, and carnival devils in fright-masks ran amok in the streets at festival time.

Such physical comedy was common currency in entertainments put on for a largely illiterate populace, and in turn led to the development of the famous Commedia dell’arte. This highly stylised form of theatre arose in Italy around the middle of the 16th century and involved stock characters and traditional storylines, with an emphasis on inspired lunacy, tumbling and physical slapstick. The generic name, however, encompassed various strands of the form, as it was also known as Commedia dell’improvviso (from the performers’ habit of extemporising much of the comic detail as they went along), Commedia dei Zanni (from the comedy servant parts which provided much of the rumbustious humour) and Commedia dei Maschere (from the masks they wore).

Several of the characters found a life outside the form. Chief among these was Pantalone, who became the slippered fool of Elizabethan theatre; Colombina, the eternal love interest; and Pulcinella, who still lives on in many a seaside booth as the hook-nosed Mr Punch. But it was the two male characters, Arlecchino and Pedrolina, as Harlequin and Pierrot respectively, who would found the dynasty of clowns that succeeded and eventually usurped them in the affections of the mass audience. In both costume and characterisation they were the prototype comic duo of the stage, their strength as a unit feeding on the contrasts between them – Pierrot in white face and with his perpetually sad expression was the eternal disappointed lover while Harlequin, the more brightly dressed of the pair, was both more physically robust and more overtly violent. By the 18th century, as the Comnmedia dell’arte form declined, it was gradually replaced by the Harlequinade, a hectic comic interlude designed to showcase the talents of the most popular performers of the day.

At that time in Western Europe there were two artists, virtual contemporaries, whose reputations survive through imitation even today. Joseph Grimaldi was one, the clown’s clown who would give his name to all the other performers who succeeded him in his profession. The illegitimate son of Giuseppe Grimaldi, the ballet master at Drury Lane, Joey became so popular in his appearances at Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells that the Harlequinade section of the show was expanded in order to become the main focus of the show. A skilled tumbler and acrobat, Grimaldi’s garb of baggy trousers, patched coat and fantastic wig would become the basis of clown costume the world over. Hugely successful in his day, he nevertheless died in obscurity, worn out by overwork fourteen years after his final appearance.

Joseph Grimaldi, 1778–1837

If Grimaldi was the star descendant of the Harlequin figure, in France around the same time it was Pierrot who rose to prominence. As personified by Jean-Gaspard Baptiste Deburau, he was eventually immortalised in Marcel Carné’s classic 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis. Deburau arrived in Paris in 1814 as part of his father’s troupe of tumblers and rope-dancers, and made an enduring name for himself at his father’s Théâtre des Funambules on the bustling Boulevard du Temple.

His graceful, silent, suffering Pierrot was adopted as one of their own by artists and intellectual, who saw in the character a metaphor for the darker side of the happy-go-lucky clown. This image was enhanced by the ghostlike, voluminous white gown he habitually wore and the sinister black skullcap. Yet in his time Deburau was also a champion of the common man: ever-hopeful but invariably doomed to disappointment, quick-witted and occasionally cruel. He reflected the rebellious spirit of the Boulevard du Temple, the centre of popular entertainment in Paris which became so notorious for its after-dark activities that it was nicknamed the ‘Boulevard of Crime’.

Once these two great names had gone, around the middle of the last century, the clown show rapidly declined, probably due to the absence of any similar talent big enough to carry on the tradition. The pantomimes of which Harlequinades had once formed a part became more plot-driven and the next generation of clowns were to grow up in the music halls as acrobats, variety artists and all-purpose comedy performers.

One branch of the clowning family split off to become the ancestors of today’s stand-up comedians, but those who stayed closer to the mainstream found a new impetus in the circus. This kind of entertainment had grown strong by the 19th century, an offshoot of the travelling fairs and wayside attractions which had been doing the rounds of Europe for centuries. The traditions of rope-walking, tumbling, trick-riding and animal acts were to reach their most extravagant zenith under the entrepreneurial influence of Barnum and Bailey in the US, for whom the circus was to become big-time showbusiness.

Early circuses were literally rings designed to stage horse-riding tricks, and clowning had developed out of the funny business performed by the horse-holders in the interludes between acts. Again, the basis of the act was that contrast between straight and stooge, the Pierrot and the Harlequin; the one stood on his dignity, the other existed to puncture it.

By the start of this century the time was ripe for the next great clown to take his bow. His name was Karl Adrien Wettach from Switzerland, who as a boy had toured Europe with the circus. He retained his stage name Grock when he found fame as an individual performer, initially as part of a double act with Brick. Mute but eloquent, at the mercy of any and every inanimate object within reach, the basis of Grock’s act was that he would play a musical instrument badly at first (he was in fact proficient in twenty), only to find that he could play it rather beautifully after all, and in the process share the delight of that discovery with the audience. His appearance was subtly different from Grimaldi’s, with a big red mouth, massive tail coat incongruously embellished with a collar and tie, tight trousers, hulking boots and a bald wig topped with a bowler hat. But the happy mask hid a sad heart, and a typical picture of Grock shows the man wiping away tears as he stands in front of the clown’s image.

As a direct result of such inspiring names, the art of clowning became so well established a discipline that schools were set up to teach it. Fred Karno’s Factory in Camberwell, for instance, went on to produce such famous Old Boys as Max Miller, Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin. But it was in a completely new form of entertainment that the latter two were to make their names and fortunes.

Music halls declined with the advent of film, but the theatre’s loss was to be the film industry’s gain. Laurel and Chaplin made it big in America as did Buster Keaton, WC Fields and Harold Lloyd, who all came from the US equivalent of music hall, vaudeville. The twenties and thirties also saw the rise of manic groups such as the Brothers Marx and Ritz and the Three Stooges, whose fast and frantic lunacy, based on simple physical contact, flying objects and escalating cartoon violence, often appealed to the children in the audience, if not the child in the adult.

Meanwhile, intellectuals of the theatre like Meyerhold in Russia and Artaud in France continued to acknowledge the influence of the clown in their work. Artaud in particular used pure gesture and mime to bring out the underlying savagery of the human psyche. His experiments in the Theatre of Cruelty were designed to break down the barriers of what was acceptable in order to liberate the audience, in the same way that a clown would step beyond the bounds of normal behaviour in order to provoke a reaction of shocked laughter. In the fifties, Samuel Beckett, an Irishman writing in French, conceived the characters Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot as a couple of music hall patter performers, and in 1965 Buster Keaton, the last of the great silent physical clowns, made one of his final appearances in Beckett’s only film, Film.

Still, the traffic was not all one way. Film in turn would influence circus clowns who adopted certain Keystone Kops-style gags for their own use, like the collapsing car and the custard pie fight, while television would bring succeeding generations of comics to an ever-widening audience. In Britain Max Wall assumed the bald wig and outsize shoes of the clown to incarnate his most famous (and darkly humorous) creation Professor Wallofsky, inventing in the process extraordinary dance routines that he put down to “legmania”. Norman Wisdom, one of this country’s most successful comedians of the fifties and sixties, was, in contrast, the little boy lost, his big soulful eyes begging forgiveness for the blundering clumsiness that masked genuine physical dexterity. “Don’t laugh, it’s cruel,” admonished Wall; “Don’t laugh at me ’cos I’m a fool,” pleaded Wisdom – two faces of the same comic coin.

And still it goes on. In the seventies Frank Spencer’s gift for mayhem took over where the Pythons left off, stretching the bounds of the familiar into the realm of the absurd, and nowadays the art of physical comedy is alive and well in the safe, if manic, hands of such TV performers as Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Rowan Atkinson and Reeves and Mortimer. On film Steve Martin and Jim Carrey continue the tradition while back on the stage where it all began, Slava Polunin stands in direct line of descent from the immortals of the past. Outward forms may come and go, but the talents that enliven those forms still endure, and there is plenty of life in the Old Dog Clown yet!