Death of a Clown: Pierrot falls behind

Laughter and cruelty are fond lovers. They have independent lives but they have a great time when they hang out together. In clowning, there is a danger they become codependent, the clown inflicting cruelty upon himself in order to create the amusement among the audience he craves.

It is this codependency Ryan Napier explores in Death of a Clown, putting himself through the wringer for a chuckle or even a smirk. Pierrot, the naive, trusting fool, is summoned by Ryan Napier in whiteface and we watch the excruciating process of an incompetent mime desperately trying to be loved.

It takes skill to act incompetent, and Napier certainly has it. He also has the insight to bring a disapproving Andrew Buckland in for a guest appearance, which makes for the best moment of the show. It is an inspired moment, for we cannot watch a mime in South Africa and not have Buckland at back of mind. But though Napier managed to elicit a chuckle or two, raise some pathos, it was automatic response, a brief knee-jerk stroke of pity for our own foolish desire to be loved and the resultant cruelty we inflict on ourselves.

While the performance is supposed to make us cringe, much of the cringing was of the wrong sort, wincing at the predominant lack of originality in the work rather than a sympathetic recoil.

Partly because Napier’s clown is the struggling, inept artist. A stereotype that has had every drop of blood wrung out of it since the age of the medieval minstrel. The trick missed here is that Pierrot as a character has been claimed to fit the cause of every movement from the Romantics to the Modernists and Napier’s failure is that of adapting him to a contemporary setting. That Death of a Clown could’ve been played on an Elizabethan stage is not testament to its timelessness but to its tiredness.

If Napier wishes to delve into Pierrot, the question of who fits our modern day Pierrot is a question begging to be explored. Trump could fit the bill, or, closer to home, what of the irrelevant yet insistent voice of the Old White Male, a comical character on whom cruelty is begging to be inflicted? Or, more daringly, and arguably more pertinently, could our naive, trusting fool be the credulous poor student conned by cynical powermongers into putting their body on the #Feesmustfall frontline in a war the winning of which would leave them sitting broken and discarded in the ashes of a world they believed they were working to improve?

At the risk of repetition, theatre does not have to engage in contemporary political or social issues but it does need to talk to its audience if it seeks to engage rather than simply entertain. The universal trope of the struggling artist, the misunderstood performer, is overused, and among an audience grappling with the issues shouting their challenge right out there on the street outside the theatre, has short thrift.

Napier has fine physicality, a willingness to push himself into zones of discomfort and good comic timing. That was not enough. There needs to be something new, something different. Beyond Buckland, there wasn’t.

The character of Pierrot is a century’s-old well of symbolism and meaning that can be plumbed to irrigate the developing archetypes of a new consciousness. Death of a Clown offers but a sip from a cup that skims the surface of those waters.

Death of a Clown is on at the Cape Town Fringe again on Wednesday 28 and Thursday 29 September. Booking and details here. 

— Steve Kretzmann