Genuinely fearing for my life, I tried to think of something else. Like… how does an overdressed, pathetically outlandish, absurdly silent creature do this to a bunch of strangers? I didn’t actually get to an answer because I lost focus on the rational and started laughing again. Snot dribbling, eye watering, heart contracting, can’t breathe laughing.
PERHAPS, PERHAPS…QUIZAS is playing at one of my favourite venues, Old 505 Theatre in Newtown. It’s a small independent theatre which consistently punches above its weight but as the intro last night said “It’s not often we have an artist fly in from Mexico.” Gabriela Muñoz is a legend in the clowning community. And her internationally feted creation, Greta, is here for the first time.
To get the Miss Haversham references over early, Greta is alone, a wedding fantasist, spurned yet desperate for love and garbed in a tattered bridal gown. She doesn’t notice us until the audience is fully seated and then we become her playmates in a shared fantasy of enduring love. The clown doesn’t speak but has a squeaky, musical intonation that’s useful when we don’t get what is required of us by the eternally quizzical eyebrow or her small, intimate movements.
After a series of bridal related mini scenes, there is audience involvement but it is so gentle, so funny, so beautifully guided by Greta’s enveloping warmth that there is little to fear. Even if the thought makes you nervous. On the way home, when my rational thought had returned, I thought what skill it took to choose the right people, to mould them to a story’s purpose, to cherish and love them and then send them back to their seats happy and fulfilled.
This show is a masterclass in skill. Clowning and mime. From tiny, perfect motions to a face across which can flicker a series of emotions before settling on one, there is barely a grand gesture in the one hour show and I found myself often leaning forward, drawn to watch her closely. Somehow hilariously attuned to her inner world until her Pierrot-like heart is broken again. In the little film which begins the show, we see a Greta dismissed. And toward the end of the performance we see this Greta again.
And now I, and everyone I could see of the audience, couldn’t breathe for a different reason, sadness. However, wistful and stoically aspirational, Greta is the great survivor. My poor heart wouldn’t take it if she wasn’t.
PERHAPS, PERHAPS…QUIZAS is playing at the Old 505 Theatre, 5 Eliza Street, Newtown, until May 13.