Clown training comes in handy for play’s pratfall-prone star

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This article was published 16/04/2015 (3297 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Australian Tom Flanagan can’t keep mum about his lifelong admiration for classic silent movies.

“I used to watch Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as a kid all the time,” says Flanagan, making his Winnipeg debut in his old-school slapstick comedy Kaput at Manitoba Theatre for Young People. “I was so fascinated how they told a story without words.”

So when the graduate of the Flying Fruit Flies — Australia’s national youth circus — was looking for a vehicle for his acrobatics and clowning talents in 2011, he narrowed his focus to silent films, where the performer has only body language and facial expressions to evoke a character and tell a story.

“Originally, it was going to be a silent film, a live silent film,” Flanagan, 28, said this week during a break between shows for school audiences.

His stumbling block was being unable to find an obstacle for his character. A clown needs an objective and then a lot of obstacles that will entertain audiences, he says. Then he and his director Gareth Bjaaland had a breakthrough.

“One day we realized we didn’t need to be in a movie — let’s put on a movie,” he says. “We put on a movie that never comes on.”

What they came up with was the story of an eager silent-movie projectionist preparing to screen a film at Cinema Kaput. As he prepares to start up the temperamental projector, it promptly spits out a part that flies through the screen. It is his attempts to repair the damage that unleashes Flanagan’s found-object clowning.

The unnamed Mr. Fix-it valiantly fights the forces of chaos represented by planks, a ladder, a bucket of glue and sticky tape. He throws popcorn at the audience, almost taunting young viewers into a response.

“It sort of eggs the kids on to a very dangerous point, where they just might storm the stage,” says Flanagan, whose last address before hitting the road was in Melbourne. “It’s controlled chaos. I just ride that thin line and keep control without talking. I think that’s the beauty of this show.”

He has been preparing most of his life for touring Kaput, which he has performed more than 300 times, including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He was a hyperactive six-year-old when his parents came upon the idea to siphon off some of his energy by enrolling him in the Flying Fruit Flies circus school. The school employs Russian and Chinese teachers, who whipped him into shape and gave him a lot of high-end skills that, for a while, found an outlet at a series of contemporary Australian circuses.

“My signature trick is doing a somersault off a ladder with drinks on a tray and not spilling a drop,” he says. “I did a show in a bar recently with four glasses of whiskey and didn’t spill a drop. In this show I somersault with a bucket full of glue — it’s water, actually — which I land with on my head.”

The clumsy character in Kaput is very near and dear to Flanagan, whose own life is often a series of minor catastrophes.

“It is me,” he says. “I’m like that. The other night, I lost my keys in Winnipeg. My friend told me, ‘You are not being the clown (in the show); you are the clown.’ It’s annoying but true.”

This is his second time in Canada performing Kaput and his North American tour continues to Calgary, Banff and Cleveland. Last year he played in Vancouver, Penticton, B.C., Ottawa and Montreal, where he visited the headquarters of Cirque du soleil, the internationally renowned troupe that beckons acrobats from all over the world.

“Not me,” Flanagan says. “I have never aspired to it. What they do is very impersonal. No one is a face at Cirque du soleil. Their performers are little robots that get painted up and hidden behind the facade of Cirque du soleil. I’m about breaking the fourth wall, not making one.”

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca