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Not your average family
THE FAMILY (SEMIANYKI)
Hackney Empire
HALF-WAY through Teatr Licedei’s show, a telephone rings. The mother (Olga Eliseeva) of the bespectacled family of clowns preens herself, polishes her glasses, adjusts her bosom and picks up the phone.
But it’s not for her. It’s for a man in the front row. He listens nervously. Apparently, row three must leave now – they’re ruining the show.
The bad feelings don’t last long though. Soon, the demented clown children are running through the audience, planting kisses on anyone they can get their hands on.
A mute 100-minute clown show on a sparse set with audience participation (that frequent dramatic millstone) might sound like a long night in hell, but Russian clown company Licedei are old hands at making something out of nothing.
Founded in the USSR in 1968 by a group of clowns including Slava Polunine (of the now world-famous Slava’s Snow Show), the company lived and rehearsed in an abandoned abbey.
With little or no money for props and effects, they constructed a form of physical theatre that proved so popular that Soviet officials were begrudgingly forced
to let them tour the world.
Years on, the Iron Curtain a distant memory, The Family finds Licedei still brimming with wild-haired characterisation, visual slapstick, and acute observations.
Alexander Gusarov suffers profusely as the father, habitually terrorised by his quartet of devious children. This nuclear family is held precariously together by Eliseeva’s matriarch, a fantastic, grimacing figure, about 25 months pregnant and on heat.
From little more than a ski pole, a rocking chair, a dodgy chandelier and a portrait of someone looking disturbingly similar to Camilla Parker-Bowles, the players have managed to make something witty, inventive and consistently engaging. So engaging, in fact, that at one point a 75 year-old man leapt from his seat to join in a
pillow fight.
And when the lights came up and the show finished, both adults and children stayed behind to play with the props and party streamers.
Great fun.
Until July 29
020 8985 2424 |
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