Make the Führer laugh

Clowns play to a tough crowd in
SideMart Theatrical Grocery’s Oooo!

SIDEMART RAVE: Alain Goulem

By NEIL BOYCE

The first, sketchy information I had on the show was: Clowns. Germany. 1930s. Now, “Hitler’s Nazi Clowns” would have made a great headline, but isn’t really accurate. Enlightenment came with a noisy phone call to SideMart Theatrical Grocery, director and cast members talking over each other with jokes and insults, as actors do, and Alain Goulem yelling what sounded like, “Yes, I’m allowed to ride the clown bike!!” at castmate Graham Cuthbertson as he picked up the phone.

Since SideMart artistic director Andrew Shaver and friends spun the company off from SaBooge Theatre in 2006, they’ve been steadily building a reputation for exciting, bold material; their last, The Haunted Hillbilly, a masterpiece of American Gothic sleaze. Their latest, Oooo!, by Catalan playwright Gerard Vàsquez, could easily be their most challenging.

Vàsquez’s story about a troupe of clowns inside Nazi Germany includes the real-life figure Charlie Rivel, who was made to perform for Hitler. Rivel survived the war, went on to fame in his native Barcelona, made an appearance in Fellini’s film Clowns and continued a career that would last until his death in 1983.

“It was just an incredible story,” Goulem says. An actor with an extensive background in the history and art of clowning, Goulem did a reading of the translated script at Playwright’s Workshop in 2007, then sold Shaver on premiering a production in English. Goulem’s previous collaboration with the SideMart gang (in Morris Panych’s The Dishwashers) made Shaver keen on working with the veteran actor again. “We thought this would be a great idea,” Shaver says, “Al’s one of our favourites.”

The fertile story with its stark contrasts makes a perfect fit for the company. “There’s an element to it that’s constant in all the scripts we’ve chosen,” says Shaver, “which is finding humour in what is sad—in this case, horrific—but also in finding poignancy in what is funny.

“This play takes that to extremes. You think of clowns and your thoughts go in one direction, then think of Nazi Germany and it goes a whole other way. That tension, the juxtaposition of those images, makes a huge dramatic terrain to mine.”

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Across the hall in the main theatre, the Segal has prepared a heavyweight line-up for its latest, Dangerous Liaisons. Christopher Hampton’s play, made famous through several film adaptations, revels in the cruel games and sexual manipulations performed by bored aristocrats in 18th century France, shortly before the peasants got fed up with that shit and chopped off their heads.

A natural at the grand spectacle, Alexandre Marine returns to the Segal (following his Amadeus), directing Brett Christopher (a tour-de-force in his Segal solo I Am My Own Wife) as Vicomte de Valmont, with Québécoise TV and sketch actress Catherine de Sève playing her first English stage role as the Marquise de Merteuil.

The great-looking supporting cast includes Jake Epstein, Anthousa Harris and Gemma James-Smith.

“This play and its themes of sex, power and manipulation are universal,” says Marine. “We’re still playing by the same rules as two centuries ago. You need look no further than today’s news at how little time is taken up by actual news versus tabloid sex scandals.”