The cathartic power of laughter has never been lost on the Russian people, despite, or perhaps because of their momentous history. Through war and repression, clowns from Bim Bom and Karandesh to Yuri Nikulin and Oleg Popov have kept Russians laughing at their pains, while Russia's most famous contemporary clown, Slava Polunin (creator of the international hit "Slava's Snow Show") has built from the genre a dreamlike escape from darker realities. Stalin may have coopted the subversive potential of laughter by creating the Soviet Academy for Political Clowns in 1926, but it is the troupe and school of Polunin's Teatr Licedei which carries the flame of Russian clownery in the world today. Created in 1968 in Leningrad, the troupe forged its style - and aroused State suspicion - on a preference for Western music over Politburo-approved themes of glorious labors, but was allowed to travel and so spread its fame abroad. After an intercontinental "Peace Train" that foreshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a spectacular funeral ceremony to lay the company to rest on its 20th anniversary, the Licedei was reborn in post-USSR society primarily as a clown school, housed today by the Drama Academy of the University of St. Petersburg.
But in this country of revolutions, a smaller kind of overthrow is taking place in the world of its clowns, led by the troupe known as Semianyki (The Family), former Licedei students. Their name comes from the show they created while still in school, a wacky family portrait that easily makes the Adams Family look like the Brady Bunch and which recently celebrated its 700th performance. Great acts are hard to follow but the six clowns of Semianyki (Alexander Gusarov, Olga Eliseeva, Marina Makhaeva, Yulia Sergeeva, Kasyan Ryvkin and Elena Sadkova) are giving it their best shot and enjoying the kind of success that creates more enemies than friends, prompting them to break out on their own, with a theater, the Chaplin Hall, just for them in St. Petersburg, and decorated to their kooky, kitschy taste.
The company's history interests me as I saw the show in one of its early performances and walked the streets of their stomping grounds in St. Petersburg this spring. But with Semianyki, the main thing is the fun - and so much of it - that takes place on stage. The Semianyki are six oddballs : deadbeat dad, mother hen-mambo queen and four incorrigibly mischievous children, right down to the baby. The parents get it on whenever the youngsters' backs are turned, but left to their own devices, the kids have a seemingly limitless repertoire of tortures and annoyances for their genitor. Before Dad knows it, on any given day, he might be clothes-pinned to his chair and speared with a ski pole to prevent him from engaging in his two favorite activities : walking out and drinking. Mom is a matron of popular legend and ethnic jokes, keeping her cherubs in line with withering looks, a sergeant's boot and a fountain of sloppy kisses. The offspring of their unabashedly passionate union are part mad scientist, part chainsaw murderer, and the trouble they can get into is as limitless as it is ingenious.
The Semianyki write a devilishly hysterical send-up of any parenting book ever written but the gags are really only a pretence: love and togetherness ultimately carry the day. That the message comes through loud and clear despite barely a word being spoken is proof of the ingeniousness and generosity of these unparalleled clowns who draw the audience immediately into their nutty world, not only with abundant opportunities for interaction but with powerfully evocative images and richly drawn characters. We are only too happy to stay under their spell, an ingenious left-handed homage to the joys, fears and crocodile tears of childhood. If you can't catch them now, look for their return, by popular demand, in November. Brilliant!
To July 2, Tues-Sat. 8:30 pm, Sun, 3 pm, Théâtre du Rond-Point, 2 bis, avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt,
8e, Métro Franklin D. Roosevelt ou Champs-Élysées Clemenceau,10 euros-34 euros, tel: 01 44 95 98 21.
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