Comedy doesn’t get any more cinematic than Playtime, Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece. Shot on 70mm (the widescreen format associated with such epics as Lawrence of Arabia) and filmed just outside Paris on a specially constructed city-like set nicknamed Tativille, the picture follows assorted tourists and commuters in their mishap-laden encounters with a sterile, mechanised modern world. Near-plotless and with minimal dialogue, Playtime took three years to make and helped to bankrupt its creator, who wanders through the action as his signature character, the bumbling Monsieur Hulot. Yet it remains the ultimate proof, as the late Terry Jones put it, that comedy “could be both funny and beautiful”.
With its highly detailed steel-and-glass cityscape and carousel-like traffic jams, the film is not the most obvious candidate for a stage adaptation with a cast of five. If anyone can pull it off, though, it will be Dancing Brick, AKA the husband-and-wife team of Valentina Ceschi and Thomas Eccleshare, who trained at the Jacques Lecoq clown school in Paris. “Slapstick is such a wonderful leveller,” Ceschi tells me during rehearsals at a community centre in Northampton. “It shows that we’re all human and vulnerable.”
