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.
The list of his students and acolytes is long and illustrious, and includes Sacha Baron Cohen (who called him “the funniest man I have ever met”), Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and Roberto Benigni. And more recently, the granddaddy of nu-clown, Phil Burgers, alongside smash-hit acts such as Julia Masli, Damian Warren-Smith (of West End hit Garry Starr: Classic Penguins) and Britain’s Got Talent champ Viggo Venn.
Gaulier and his philosophies have had an immeasurably joyful impact on that area of comedy that overlaps with theatre, resulting in a generation of comics who are not just wannabe TV presenters or panel show talking heads in waiting, but who make their work out on a limb, in open dialogue with whomever is in the audience on the night, brimming with (often delinquent) pleasure just to be on stage.
Like most great pedagogies, Gaulier’s was an instruction for life as well as for performances. And in his, pleasure and lack of self-seriousness were key. We are all ridiculous. Gaulier taught his students to stop hiding it – to delight in it, in fact, because the specific ways in which we’re ridiculous may be precisely what might make us unique and engaging on stage (and off?). And to have a whole audience looking at you and hanging on your every word? How lucky you are! Don’t squander it, and don’t dare – the worst form of ingratitude, this – be tedious or predictable. Should they ever be, his ex-students would find themselves for years afterwards haunted by a croaky French-accented voice in their heads. “This ees boring. Eet ees so shit!”
None of which is to say that Gaulier-trained skills don’t lend themselves to serious theatre, too: his graduates include Kathryn Hunter, Rachel Weisz and the Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush. But even a dramatic actor can bring to their performance – as the best do – a sense of privilege and pleasure that what they’re doing, really, is just playing at being someone else. Gaulier certainly never forgot that it was all, life as well as theatre, a big game – and for teaching so many to play it a little bit more joyfully, he will be long and warmly remembered.
