In Chaplin's footsteps: How James Thiérrée became vaudeville royalty
James Thiérrée is the scion of vaudeville royalty. Just don't tell him that he's the image of his grandfather...
By Jenny Gilbert
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If anyone ever had good reason to want a nice quiet job in a bank
when he grew up, it was the young James Thiérrée. From the age of four,
alongside his three-year-old sister, he spent his childhood appearing in
theatres across Europe and North America as a piece of luggage that
sprouted little legs and ran around.
The show was his parents' own Cirque Imaginaire, a novelty in the
late 1970s as one of the first circus shows to do without sawdust and
trained animals. Its successor, Le Cirque Invisible, pushed the envelope
further, and British theatre-goers of the late 1980s who managed to
find their way to the old Thames-side venue The Mermaid may recall –
along with memories of an elfin gymnast who turned herself into fantasy
monsters by carrying quantities of chairs, and an older man with a dippy
Harpo Marx smile who performed opera with his kneecaps – an uncommonly
pimple-free youth, his long wavy hair flaring out in a halo, soaring
about on bungee ropes like the Angel Gabriel. It was almost certainly
that performance that gave Peter Greenaway the idea of casting the
teenaged Thiérrée as Ariel in his 1991 film Prospero's Books.
James is lumbered with performing ancestry: his dad Jean-Baptiste
Thiérrée gave up a career on the classical French stage to develop his
musical vaudeville act; his dancer-cum-designer mother Victoria was the
third' of Charlie Chaplin's eight children with Oona O'Neill, herself
the daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. So, at an early age, he
had to decide to do something defiantly ordinary, or seize his genetic
fate.
In the vacant tearoom of a smart hotel in the French city of Lyon,
where Thiérrée is touring his new one-man show Raoul before bringing it
to London, he is, by his own admission, wiped out with exhaustion, yet
strong physical family traits still shine through. His face echoes his
grandfather's fine-boned wolfishness. His dark hair is the same
vigorously curly mop, which at the front is prematurely blotched with
silver (he turned 37 this year). Even slumped in an armchair, shod in
orange trainers, Thiérrée's light frame has the high-tuned look of a
body that can do pretty much anything its owner asks of it, be that
descending a long ladder by slithering slowly head-first between
alternate rungs, or tripping over a non-existent ruck in a carpet, only
to bounce straight back up and trip over again. But if you think this
sounds like stuff you've seen before, perhaps in a black-and-white
silent film, you are only partly there. Thiérrée's medium is an amalgam
of live theatre with elements of vaudeville, circus and dance – and you
can forget about Cirque du Soleil, too. Those terms hardly begin to
describe Thiérrée's celebration of low-tech, high-impact stage design,
its extraordinary atmosphere, or the existential questions it lightly
touches on.
"I'm still trying to find the rhythm of the new show," he confesses.
"Having done three previous shows with a cast of four or five people
around me [all these shows have travelled to London in the past 10
years], being alone on stage each night feels hugely different – a
liberation in its way, but daunting."
Strictly speaking, Thiérrée isn't alone on stage. Raoul, the
fictional hermit whose wordless story this is, makes his first entrance
scrambling on to the stage from the stalls as if it's the last ridge of a
mountain range he has had to cross to reach his home, a precariously
constructed giant tepee of scaffolding poles. Wild-eyed and dishevelled,
Raoul may be returning from fighting a war, or fending off global
meltdown – we never know. What we do soon discover is that an intruder –
an impersonator, even – has stolen his identity and inveigled his way
into his hearth and home. To his fury and dismay, Raoul finds himself
usurped.
The sleight-of-hand comedy Thiérrée mines from this situation is at
once frenetic, unsettling, hilarious and profound. In the hand-to-hand
combat that ensues, the audience keeps thinking the invader is about to
be unmasked (as indeed, he is, repeatedly), but each time it is
Thiérrée's face and body that emerge, raising the outlandish possibility
that Raoul/Thiérrée really does have a doppelgänger.
More whimsically, Raoul also entertains various non-human visitors,
fantastical creatures fashioned from scrap materials: a crayfish
immaculately crafted out of industrial metal tubing; a giant jellyfish
in shimmering antique silk; a skeletal wading bird made from frayed
string; and, most fantastic of all, a spectral, life-size fabric
elephant. You never see wheels or pulleys or a body inside. Part of the
beauty of each scuttling or lumbering creature is its seeming
self-locomotion.
Thiérrée loves the sense that, exquisite as these objects are,
they're the result of someone sitting down with a needle and thread.
He's also a stickler for using outmoded theatrical machinery, so no
electronics. The movement of the cloth we see in the opening – a vast
Gericault-like tableau of swathes of grubby sailcloth – is all
controlled with cords and counterweights filled with sand. But why make
life so difficult?
"Because the result is warm, and operates on a human scale. It's the
same with the props. They're all things picked up in flea markets and
salvage yards, with a sense of having lived a life already. You just
can't compete with film and computerised imagery, so I deliberately go
in the opposite direction." That's why, in a flying sequence near the
end of the show, he has the lighting swing round to show the stage hands
manipulating the flying crane, with Raoul, oblivious, doing his soaring
through a night-sky bit, strapped to the other end. What the audience
gets is a layered reality. By showing the mechanics, the routine is
doubly interesting, yet the magic remains intact.
While Thiérrée himself takes the credit as set designer – along with
lighting design and musical direction – it was his mother he invited to
devise and make the creatures; clear evidence, if any were needed, that
her son is perfectly at ease picking up the family baton. They are
hardly in each other's pockets these days, though: James lives with his
girlfriend in Paris, while his parents are based in Burgundy. And given
the amount of time they spend on their separate tours (missing each
other by a matter of weeks in London, this time round) they see each
other rarely.
"People assume it must have been a problem for me, my parents being
such a global success and my choosing the same creative line. But just
as my father was an actor who taught himself clowning, and my mother a
dancer who taught herself other skills, I've also taken bits and pieces
from all over. We're all bouncing between different disciplines and I've
perhaps moved further away from circus than they have. My only
responsibility is to the audience, in taking them to a place in their
heads where they don't feel quite secure. It's tempting to rely on
rewards for comic effects, because that's immediately gratifying. But
Raoul isn't meant to be pure comedy. I try to think of it as a moving
sculpture, with comic moments." That said, some of the funniest at
Lyon's vast Maison de la Danse passed so solemnly that my yelps of mirth
had to be muffled, if only out of politeness. "Oh, that's typical
French," Thiérrée quips. "They think it's terribly serious as I used the
Schubert quintet on a loop earlier on, and they didn't feel they'd been
given licence to laugh."
Be that as it may, the moment involved Thiérrée's character
slithering stealthily down a scaffolding pole with extreme control, then
bouncing vigorously on his backside when he reached the bottom, as if
having fallen from a great height. Isn't that the very area of sly
humour, based on subverting expectation and undermining physical laws,
that his grandfather traded in as a performer?
There is a faintly hollow sense of victory in getting Thiérrée to
admit that, yes, if you must, some of what he does could be seen as
Chaplinesque. He is, after all, entitled as an artist to carve out his
own path, not to have to retread the tracks left by a man he can barely
remember. But then, as Thiérrée properly points out, Charlie may not
have been the first to do those Chaplinesque gags either. He, too, was
working within a genre, applying his skills to standard vaudeville
tropes. Tradition, as Thiérrée describes it, "is like a strong wind at
your back. You don't necessarily pay it attention, you just feel it."
I ask him, as a final throw, whether he intends his curtain calls as a
tidbit tossed to fans who have come hoping to witness some directly
channelled Charlie-isms. It is indeed a delicious moment when Thiérrée
comes bowling on like a blown leaf, running and twirling in tiny
irregular steps as if imminently about to trip over both feet, at once
delighted and a touch affronted to see how many people have been out
there watching him all along. And it does come across as a truly Chaplin
moment.
Thiérrée's brow darkens. "Did it really look like I meant to do that?
Then I must look again at those curtain calls. That was me just having
fun and messing about. I really don't want anyone to think I'm making a
reference. I don't want people to think that at all."
