When I was starting out as a theatre-maker, back in the last millennium, there were three ways (or so we thought) you could educate yourself in the trade. If you wanted to be taken seriously and say a lot of words, drama school in the UK was your bag. If you wanted to make theatre with your body, École Jacques Lecoq in Paris beckoned. And if you wanted to perform with your whole heart, shared innocence and transcendent idiocy, you went to École Philippe Gaulier. That’s what my pal Alex Murdoch did, and she returned with a suite of his teachings (about clowning and so much more than clowning) that the two of us made theatre with for the next 17 years.
Few knew back then, although the process was already under way, that Gaulier – who has died aged 82 – would go on to become a bigger name in comedy than in theatre training. This was much to the great man’s disgust. “I hate standup comedy,” he growled at me when I interviewed him a decade ago. “I would never teach something so horrible.” And nor did he. But he did teach skills – of playfulness and alertness to a crowd; of being vividly alive in the moment; of celebrating your own ridiculousness – that made standups, sketch comics and clowns much better at their jobs. In his later years, “Gaulier-trained” became a must-have imprimatur for scores of comic acts, particularly those wishing to join in the thrilling boom in innovative clown-comedy that has lit up the circuit in recent times.
