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A blizzzard of bubbles with Slava and green clad friends. Picture: Aya Rufin Slava's Snowshow The Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham **** If someone had asked Samuel Beckett to pen a play about clowns this could well have been the result. Forget circus rings with its fall apart cars with eccentric wheels and buckets rich with an impending deluge of shaving foam – this is clowning of the absurd. To say it is different would be the understatement of the year. Clowning is an art form going back beyond the pharaohs and ancient Greeks. It was seen in court jesters who used humour to question power while Shakespeare used them in the likes of King Lear and Twelfth Night, mixing wit and humour with melancholy, creating fools who entertained with laughs while quietly stripping away life's defences to expose truths. Russian clown Slava Polunin has added another chapter to the tradition with his genre defying Snowshow. It is a show with a theme rather than a narrative, a series of unconnected vignettes which the audience can interpret however they wish.
Picture: Veronique Vial Slava's character is the yellow clad Asisyai who meanders through the show in an air of innocence, eliciting feelings of loneliness, of melancholy, happiness, sadness and even wonder. Around him, in equally oversized costumes, are his green clad companions, all uniformly dressed in long coats with oversized shoes and hats with earflaps the size of jumbo jet wings. Much of the humour is physical, often human interaction, with Asisyai, in his different costume, always the outsider to the uniformed crowd but there are moments that need no explanation or interpretation, such as a phone call between lovers with Asisyai playing both parts on two oversized telephones. And there is a touching moment when a coat and hat hung on a stand become a lost love in a sad farewell at a train station. We can all see it is not real, there is no trick, anyone with a vaguely working brain cell can see how it is done, yet for some bizarre reason it strikes a chord, touches an emotion. A past farewell perhaps? A lost love? A simple, silly, albeit clever moment of clowning being far more than what we physically see, which is perhaps the secret of the aa not so much what we see as what we feel. It is all very clever, very precise, each, glance and gesture placed there to make a point, each movement having a purpose, all there for us to make sense of the apparent chaos.
A giant spider's web that leaves the stage to envelop the audience. Picture: Aya Rufin The show first appeared in 1993 and has toured the world ever since with its mix of fantasy, tragicomedy and inanity, with the audience just as much part of the show as the clowns as they are hit by huge falls of paper snow, added to by bins emptied over them by the green clad clowns, sprayed by water and have Asisyai clambering over them walking precariously on the backs of seats. The interval becomes a snowball fight and a cheering competition, oh, and at one point the entire audience is enveloped in a huge spider's web. The show adds to the atmosphere by music choice with the likes of Chariots of Fire from Vangelis, Moonlight Sonata from Beethoven and has one of the most dramatic endings in theatre – a veritable blizzard of paper snow, so thick you can no longer see the stage, or indeed more than a row or two in front, blown offstage by gale force winds all to Carl Orff's apocalyptic O Fortuna. The audience is duly covered, children beam at the paper avalanche covering them as the gale ends and the house lights rise - but that is not the end of the show, not yet, as giant balloons appear to bounce around the audience, pushed offstage by the green clad clowns ,and we are all children again, delighting in playing with balloons. Theatre is a broad church and Slava has created his own niche unlike any other, his snowshow is whatever you want it to be, he provides the canvas and you can fill it with whatever thoughts it creates. The Alex will be a different place to 15-11-25 with cleaners no doubt having their own celebration on 16-11-25, Roger Clarke 12-11-25 |
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