The supply of superlatives and glowing adjectives has been pretty much exhausted already on the remarkable theatre of Slava Polunin. Polunin's Snowshow was the runaway success of last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, winning numerous awards, endless accolades and reducing even the most jaded Festival goer to awestruck wonder.
But with few new words of praise left for Polunin's singular brand of clowning, the question of why, and how, an unknown Russian clown should become one of the country's most popular performers remains.
Certainly, if your idea of clowning is of the Big Top custard pie and slapstick variety, then Polunin's universal appeal might seem unlikely. But the knife-edge precision of his almost under-played performance style is miles away from the frantic running around that characterises your average circus clown. While his absurd humour draws continual chuckles (and the occasionl guffaw) from the audience, pathos and poignancy are never far away.
Polunin, together with partner, Angelo de Castro, creates a world of dream-like logic, where one surreal image melts into the next. A bed becomes a boat, a women, wrapped bouquet-like in cellophane, is placed in a vase and a shadowy stilt-walker stalks across the stage.It has the roughness and strangeness of an Eastern European animation on late night Channel 4, yet there's always something familiar, something of the ordinary little occurences of everyday life. Polunin's bizarre adventuresand his relationship with de Castro's be-hatted clown, are instantly recognisable.
But, ultimately, who really needs to analyse? The peculiar magic of a theatrical treat like this (complete with gobsmacking double denouement) needs just to be experienced and enjoyed, not dissected.
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