In the 10th year of the London Clown Festival, Gutter – a Bouffon Comedy Ritual squished together bouffon, clown and drag in a grotesque whirlwind of wacky characters, at Soho Theatre on 29 June.
Chortle Award nominated for Best Alternative and Clowning, the late-night show is not for the faint-hearted.
Bouffon is a type of clowning popularised in France, often exploring a darker side: “If clown’s the child, bouffon’s the bastard”, says Gutter Fest’s website.
Clowns – by nature – are daring. They are unafraid of failure and happy to be vulnerable. This ragtag bunch were no exception, with Lady Bolognese – two amorous and rather vile dinner ladies – also more than happy to drag the audience into the mix and set them up to lose.
“Wrong!” one of them cackled and spat at a front row counsellor, looking almost like she’d crawled out of the large dustbin staged behind them – as the audience howled at her childish audaciousness.
Next up were Claire Parry, Lucy Ellis, Tom Greaves – garbed with bodily bulges and deformities true to bouffon – who played together in games that started off innocent and descended into surreal and frenetic mimicries of our most basic bodily functions.
“The three clowns led us on a dark and merry dance where no audience member was safe from being pulled into the madness,” said Bobby Wills, audience member and self-proclaimed sometime performer and clown admirer.
“A wheelie bin full of delights. Grotesque, playful, startling and surreal,” he said.
It was an hour-long edge-of-the-seat affair, and ethical boundaries were cleverly skated around.
A child was lovingly birthed and tended, before capricious clown Parry’s affections curdled with heart-wrenching speed.
Next emerged the Butcher: Lewis Blomfield took the audience on a mind-bending journey through his inner consciousness with trauma stories, thought-fragments and what-did-I-have-for-breakfast verbal diarrhoea.
Wills described the Butcher’s wit as ‘sharp as a knife’, and audience member and performer Michelle Hall said she loved it.
“It was like being with an irresponsible, unpredictable adult when you’re the kid in their care. And that was a theme,” she said.
“Images of child neglect and poverty were tossed out like bin-day refuse. And it was so funny because he was in an apron with only his jocks on. Queer and meaty.”
Hall acknowledged that some might find it ‘frightening’ and ‘confronting’ not to understand what the Butcher was saying – indeed, audience member Demi Pon said she ‘didn’t understand it’, the gentle unravelling of Blomfield’s psyche perhaps too dislocated to grasp.
Pon admired the trio’s clownish humour, ‘making sounds rather than cracking jokes’, and said that ‘all of it was ridiculous’, but Baby Lame’s drag queen energy was her favourite.
I first encountered Baby Lame in the entrance way, in a liminal moment between life and stage she described as ‘surreal’, yet when she stormed on with her massive boots, attitude, and enormous papier-mâché behind, her aggressively sexualised main character energy captivated every pair of eyes, which only sometimes had to be averted.
In all, Gutter are an underground gaggle of clowns who are well worth keeping an eye on: in just over a year, Tom Greaves produced Gutter Fest – billed on their website as the ‘world’s first bouffon festival’ – a chaotic ode to the genre featuring 60 acts.
Master clown pedagogue Philippe Gaulier himself called them ‘a little bit nasty’, and you can catch the troupe’s nastiness and brilliance at Edinburgh Fringe later this summer.
Featured image credit: Ivy Burnett
