By The Seat Of Your Pants

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS at Falkirk Town Hall, for The Scotsman, 15.3.11
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4 stars ****

WHAT DO YOU DO, if you’re a theatre fan who doesn’t really like clown shows? Well, you respect the tradition, you go along, you smile politely, you observe how much others seem to be enjoying all the obvious mugging and slapstick; and you wait, sometimes for years.

And then, at last, a show comes along that makes sense of the whole business; and does it without the help of the kind of big, adult theme that made such a memorable success of last year’s Theatre Modo clown show, Sick. Plutot La Vie’s latest children’s show is an hour-long sequence of physical comedy – with a fair bit of music, the odd song, and some stylised dialogue – about three blokes and the chairs they sit on, or fail to sit on. There are little straight chairs, average-sized bentwood chairs, one high stool. And around these chairs, with their implicit images of inclusion and exclusion, height and hierarchy, the three performers – Tim Licata, Ian Cameron and David Walshe – weave sequence after sequence of inspired comedy, ranging from a recurring send-up of a stately religious procession, to a long riff on the tragic and comic potential of death, brought on by exhaustion.

It’s hard to say why all of this works so well; but there’s something about the chemistry among the three performers – two clowns, one actor – and their director, Magdalena Schamberger, that seems to have unleashed a torrent of creativity, and a profound playfulness about the physical humiliations of life that has the little boys in the audience, in particular, convulsed with mirth. Some of the sequences are slightly stronger than others, although they all seem to have their place in the show; but by the end, the kids are literally skipping with pleasure, as they run out of the theatre, yelling “Dad! We’ve had a great time!”

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