Showing @ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 22 Oct
Members of today’s society are obsessed with fusing things in order to reduce the time they have to expend from their otherwise “hectic” lifestyles. This can result in innocuous celebrities gaining nicknames like SuBo, or in pioneering technology like the iPad. Slava Polunin’s Snowshow deftly combines mime, dance and circus with 21st century technologies, creating a performance that although defiantly modern, would be almost entirely suitable in an Ancient Greek amphitheatre.
The show focuses on a yellow clad clown and his interactions with fellow performers dressed in the same shabby green overcoat and wide-brimmed hat. It’s never clear of their relationship with the show itself presented as a kinetic tableau of scenes without need for a through line due to the performer’s authority over each discipline, from minute facial expression changes to acrobatic displays all climaxing with an unexpected and perpetuating spectacle.
First performed in the UK in 1994, conceived in 1980s USSR, and inspired by the popular mime characters of Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin, Polunin’s clown Asisiai has the audience’s full attention after unassumingly entering the stage with a piece of rope and pulling on it at varying speeds. Despite running for over a decade the show hasn’t over-complicated itself for a current audience, contrasting other circus spectacles like Cirque du Soleil. Their expertise shines throughout the performance but is notable in scenes where understated gestures are given crucial significance. This is seen in the clown’s repeated slipping of folding arms, who when becoming predictable, subverts your anticipations by rejecting the action with an understated hand signal.
The ability to create humour through repetition is apparent throughout but is never over-played to predictability. At one point a clown interrupts Asisiai by running through a scene to the sound of galloping, this is then repeated but with the clown appearing significantly after the sound effect, developing the gag and holding viewer interest. Quite simply, Polunin has carefully crafted a classical piece of pageantry that can be updated for contemporary audiences without compromising its credibility.