Chapter
1
Finding
the clowns …
And
keeping them
‘I tell my actors to ask
themselves if they’re acting and, if they are, to stop it. I like them to
reveal themselves.’[1]
As
practitioners in every field of theatre advocate a need for truth in acting, so
too the clown director/teacher seeks truthful performance from the clown. The
truth here, however, is more naked than character acting: you are you. The
vulnerability of the clown must be lived, not ‘acted’ and here we must go back
to the roots of Cal’s relationship with clowning, as an actor, when he attended
a workshop given by Pierre Byland[2].
‘I was terrified that I’d
find out that I wasn’t funny. Or that somebody who was a kind of guru would say
to me, “you’re not funny.”’[3]
This is surely something any
aspiring ‘funny man’ would feel upon embarking on a workshop led by a respected
practitioner (in fact, I can certainly vouch for my experience of this in
beginning a clown workshop with Mick
Barnfather
[4]
). This fear, however, is not necessarily a problem to overcome;
insecurity is the very condition in which we see the clown emerge. Byland,
like Gaulier, begins his ‘finding your clown’ workshop with the toughest of
all exercises, a solo improvisation with the self-explanatory name – ‘come
on and be funny’. The performer must get up unprepared, armed with no gags,
routines or ideas, and amuse everybody. Very often, they unsuccessfully try
to protect themselves by acting an idiot character.
‘There is no established
character to support the actor (e.g. Harlequin, Pantalone, etc.), so he has to
discover the clown part within himself. The less defensive he is, the less he
tries to play a character, and the more he allows himself to be surprised by
his own weaknesses, the more forcefully his clown will appear.’[5]
As Mick Barnfather said in
his workshop, “There’s no point acting the idiot when you already are
one yourself”. So we return to this concept of ‘not acting’. In these
improvisations, it is obvious to the spectator when a performer is hiding
behind ‘ideas’ or coming onstage with a plan, and it is clear when someone
‘acts’ the vulnerability (pretending they have no idea what to do and that they
are spontaneously ‘coming up’ with this clever gag) - however good an actor
they might be. The student watching this, whose turn is probably coming soon,
knows there’s no tricking the audience – you must be honest. Painfully honest.
‘Lunchtimes, all of us were
just sitting there and eating our soup with our hands over our faces; ashamed
of how we’d flopped. Completely ashamed. It was torture. And every day I had to
make myself go back.’[6]
The performer in a clown
workshop learns that ideas, in themselves, are no good. Time after time they
try an idea and are met with cold silence. This is the flop, and it is if the
performer can embrace the flop, that he will begin to find his clown. Philippe
Gaulier explains that ‘if the pleasure in staying is not great, the clown will
look like someone ashamed at being no good. He won't be loved. If the pleasure
is great, then the clown is forgiven. He's allowed to be no good over and
over.’[7]
So pleasure is the essential ingredient. A strange marriage, this, of fun and
failure, summed up beautifully by Samuel Beckett - ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No
matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’[8]
In Philippe Gaulier, Cal had
found a mentor and he enjoyed the work at Philippe’s school profoundly. He went
on to perform in Philippe’s ill-fated clown show The End of the Tunnel
(fig.4) which was a disastrously high-profile flop at the Edinburgh Festival
1991. ‘We would sneak down the fire
escape after the show to avoid audience members loitering in the foyer. This
was to become my equivalent of the stand-up comic's years of dying in the
northern clubs they set such store by. But, as they say, out of adversity… We
carried on working hard on the show with Philippe and by the time we went on
tour it was in good shape. I am proud of the work we did then, and I am sure I
could not be a director now was it not for that experience.’[9]
fig.4
(Toby Sedgwick
and Cal McCrystal in The End of the Tunnel)
Perhaps
as a performer, Cal understood that whilst Philippe had taught them well to
find their clowns, to direct a clown show required something more. Cal says his
strength as a director is: ‘I’m very good at finding what people’s clown is and
really helping them to present it.’[10]
And it is the latter part of this statement which distinguishes the director
from the teacher. In fact, the director often needs to be something of a
teacher as well.
Cal’s
rehearsals certainly contain an element of training: tit-bits of clown
methodology (sometimes without the terminology of ‘clown’ and ‘flop’ etc. for
those companies who have no clown training) and for Spymonkey there is a
continuous exploration of their clowns. Indeed, when Spymonkey first formed and
employed Cal to help them create Stiff, he spent the first few weeks of
the process work shopping their clowns. Though they had all trained at
Gaulier’s school, some had made more profound discoveries than others. In this
initial period lies a perfect illustration of the painful self-knowledge
required to find one’s clown. It is not just the ability to get back up with
pleasure from every flop that makes the clown, but the ability to invite people
to laugh at you, not with you.
‘To express one’s clown,
that means to come face to face with one’s Self, yet still stand outside one’s
Self, at the small distance where humour is located.’[11]
Or in Cal’s words: ‘Your clown is the thing about you that your friends make
fun of behind your back’[12]
– you must, therefore, be able to look at yourself and admit your own
ridiculousness.
The whole dynamic of the
Spymonkey ensemble in both Stiff and Cooped (and, indeed, what
would have been Bless) is owed to a painful discovery for Toby Park
during this embryonic stage of the company’s life.
Spymonkey initially formed
not out of any real commercial ambition but a desire to ‘develop their craft
and have fun with friends’[13]
and their work with Cal began with exploratory clown improvisations and games
based around the subject of the undertaking business (for instance, ‘which
person would you least like to leave your mother’s dead body with?’). Cal
explains how ‘it became clear during the games I played to develop clown,
designed to expose their inadequacies, that Toby was in a different world from
the others. The world of not funny. I wasn't sure how to deal with this. It was
a painful pattern of failure every day.’[14]
In exercise after exercise,
the others would make everyone laugh, but Toby would flop. Every clown must
flop but none can afford to become trapped in the flop and lose their pleasure.
Cal self-made job description was to find out what was funny about Toby, to
help him find his clown, but he was finding that ‘encouraging smiles
were not productive. Toby's morale was drooping after a couple of weeks and he
visibly began to despair.’[15]
Toby needed to confront an aspect of his personality he would, perhaps, have
preferred to deny.
‘It was in an attempt to rupture
the pattern by confronting the truth that I asked him to admit he wasn't funny.
I had a small idea that it would yield something but I didn't know where I
would take it from there and I was getting slightly desperate myself. I asked
Toby to stand in front of the group. I told him to say to us "I'm not
funny" I said I didn't want just the words but to see in his eyes that he
knew it was true. Coming at a time when he felt at rock bottom this was
extremely traumatic. It
took a quite a while for him to gather himself. When he finally said the words
we started to laugh. He was unaffected by our reaction and went on tearfully
describing his torment. We laughed till our tears flowed. What had happened was
so strong that I realised we had a hook for the show.’[16]
For
Toby, the laughter came when he was trying to be very serious about something.
And so, Forbes Murdston, the ‘great tragic actor’, was born. Toby was to be the
white clown, the chief, the idiot master to the idiot servants, and even more
the idiot for taking things so seriously. Toby’s problem provided a
breakthrough for the show about undertaking: it was to be Forbes Murdston’s
serious attempt, foiled at every corner, to stage a dramatic tribute to his
late wife.
PLAY
CLIP 1
We’ve seen how Cal sees his job as being to help people find their clown and present it. This, however, is not just a singular discovery for the performer – finding the clown is not the end. A performer’s perception of their clown can easily be tainted by their aspirations and only an outsider can keep this in check.
‘After we opened Stiff
Toby got many, many laughs. He then began surfing the laughs in a knowing way.’[17] When Toby had made his breakthrough, he was
‘unaffected by [their] reaction and went on tearfully describing his torment’;
this was the honest moment that set the mould for his clown, Forbes Murdston.
And so, when Toby began to play to the laughs, Forbes was being lost. For most
clowns, laughter can be visibly relished but in Toby’s case the pleasure must
be concealed by Forbes’ aims to keep things serious. Forbes is laughed at,
not with, and the laughter for Toby doubles when it seems genuinely
unwelcome to Forbes.
‘You always need the
director to clarify their roles and to say, ‘you are this and you are this’ -
because rarely in a company do they know. Everybody runs to the same corner,
everybody wants to be the most stupid.’[18]