Classical music blares as the audience enter The Other Palace’s steep circle of seats. In the middle of the stage, smoke rises from a chair turned away from us: the calm before the storm. The chair turns, revealing Damien Warren-Smith’s alter ego, Garry Starr.
He’s naked.
Starr does wear flippers, a ruff and a tailcoat, like the gentlemanly emperor penguin on the Penguin Books logo, but none of it covers anything. Full-frontal nudity is often the grand finale of an outrageous clown show, but here, it’s just the beginning.
He waddles over to a bookshelf housing a collection of Penguin Classics signature orange paperbacks. His mission is to perform each one, devising a clowning routine inspired by its title. He takes a book and places it under a camera so we can see it on a large screen behind him. The titles provide the kind of punchy, intriguing hooks that might tempt a reader to pull a book from the shelf, but here they become prompts for clowning games. Is there much that’s literary about it? No. There’s nothing pretentious about these routines, with most of the titles taken entirely at face value. Once he’s finished with each book, he slaps it down on the floor, quite unceremoniously, and pulls out another, until a messy pile accumulates onstage — almost as if he’s discarding the books’ actual contents after enjoying himself playing around with their titles.
The routines rarely exist in isolation. One title becomes the punchline to the previous routine and the setup for the next, giving each new book the feeling of a reveal. The stunts grow progressively more daring, difficult and entertaining, building momentum as the pile of discarded paperbacks grows.
You might think that in a show that begins with nudity you’d stop noticing it after half an hour. But Warren-Smith doesn’t let us forget. Just as you think you’ve grown accustomed to it, he presents himself from a completely new angle — or from “Wuthering Heights”. The comic and dramatic tension often comes down to how close his naked body is going to get to us, and how readily we can be encouraged to join in with his anarchic behaviour. Nothing is off limits, from Holding the Man to Body Surfers — without giving away any spoilers.
As the show progresses, Warren-Smith tears down every social convention in the book, all while ensuring everyone is having a good time. Although the audience becomes slightly more apprehensive about joining in, willing volunteers never completely dry up. With his charisma and ability to rewrite all the rules of the room, he could be a cult leader.
And tonight, he has a wealth of excellent volunteers to draw from. The Other Palace seems to be full of drama students and actors. The woman who gets up to participate in the Grapes of Wrath routine is hilarious, throwing herself into the spirit of the rebellious food fight.
The soundtrack is equally integral to the show’s success. Warren-Smith’s cheeky back-and-forth with the sound technician breaks the fourth wall and adds to the spirited chaos. He delivers his own trickster-esque renditions of everything from the wistful film theme ‘Moon River’ (you can guess where that one goes) to cheesy pop songs such as James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’.
When you leave the theatre and see people keeping to themselves on the top deck of a bus, wrapped in bundles of coats, the sheer strangeness of the experience you’ve just witnessed really hits you. This is maximalist clowning. You forgive any use of shock tactics because Warren-Smith commits wholeheartedly to his genre, delivering a madcap show that is more than a performance: it’s an experience — the full package.
Written by Damien Warren-Smith
Directed by Cal McCrystal
Lighting design by Lily Dawford
Produced by Francesca Moody
Published with Everything Theatre
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