I’ve never had any personal disdain for mime, but I’ve long understood it to be the most classically despised of the performing arts.  I was reminded when I went to text the title of this play to a friend, and my predictive phone didn’t know the word ‘mime’. 

The play begins with a classic old Charlie Chaplin style piano soundtrack and a classic stripy shirt, black pants with braces, white face, beret and ballet slippers mime (Byron Coll) enters with a smile.  The laughs begin immediately and continue frequently throughout the hour, beginning with Coll spending five minutes getting in his front door whilst (silently) calling his wife – Stella(!)  When he discovers she’s left him he attempts to end it all, to further invisible comic effect. 

It gets weird when mime #2 (Hadleigh Walker) stands inside a white square immediately begins reading aloud, from a children’s picture book with blank pages.  It’s a fairly exciting tale about a boy who builds a miniature city and then shrinks down into it, where he encounters various adventures before realising it’s nearly time for tea.

In the midst of this a 3rd mime (Sam Bunkall) enters through some kind of warped nightmare vortex.  He’s confined between two long parallel lines, existing in a similar paradigm to the first chap, except he comes across a real banana.  Comparing it to his mime banana, it’s an intense moment of discovery.

From here we begin to switch between the three characters, each going over their routines which are each time altered in accordance with increasingly unstable physical laws.  Bunkall’s street mime seems to be channeling Coll the ‘real’ mime in his busking routine; the suicide attempts aren’t so well received however.  Walker’s storytelling keeps taking different directions like a twistaplot book, and more and more mimed objects manifest in reality.

Coll discovers first real blood and then real pain.  Then when Bunkall begins to literally shift the parameter that divides them, by moving the long white stick that represents the boundary of each reality, it’s all so mind-bending, poignant, ironic and (most importantly) hilarious that by now they could do just about anything and we’ll willingly accept it.  The conceptual thoughts I left the theatre with are well in line with the Fringe festival’s unofficial running theme of existentialism and reality distinction.

So what of the wretched name of mime?  Two self-confessed mime haters in the audience declared to me their total enjoyment of this magnificently mad Magniloquents production.

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Mime is a polarizing art form, you either get it and love it, or you don’t. I’m in the former camp, especially when the performers both explore and subvert the genre.

Byron Coll, Hadleigh Walker and Sam Bunkall take mime to some very deep and dark places indeed in A Mime to Kill.

One of them holds a mime banana and a real banana and experiments with both. Another tells a story (a mime artist talking indeed!) but the picture book has no pictures. The third in a Groundhog Day kind of experience keeps reliving receiving a goodbye note from his loved one.

The three wear Marcel Marceau black and white striped tops, braces and black trousers in homage to the master of mime but they stamp their own mark on the practice.

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I’d always thought is was Jerry Seinfeld who made hating Mimes a bloodsport. It’s true they were a recurring theme in his TV series, and he did ask, in a stand-up routine, whether a cop arresting a mime would tell him he had the right to remain silent. But it was Adam Sandler’s [correction (see Comments below): Bob Goldthwait’s] Shakes the Clown (in the 1991 film of that name set in Palookaville New York) who saw his ilk as a downtrodden minority so took it out on "those silent motherf*ckers" by beating Street Mimes senseless. 

Despite the title, however, the maiming and murder of Mimes is not the focus of this new show from the Magniloquents (famed for Tap That and Tap That II: The Reckoning). A Mime to Kill is more about how the magic of mime dies when real objects and sounds intrude. Self harm and attempted suicide do play their parts, though.

Three white-face Mimes are dressed identically in classic Marceau style – striped top, black trousers & braces, black dance pumps – but each approaches at the art form in a different way.

Bryon Coll is the ‘Theatre Mime’, playing out variations on a scene of domestic discovery and emotional trauma with a mostly poker-faced precision to the accompaniment of a honky-tonk piano. He becomes discombobulated when a mimed knife draws ‘real’ blood; when the music stops and leaves him stranded; when a key prop threatens exposure to a physically real world.

As the ‘Street Mime’, Sam Bunkall’s interactions with bananas, real and imagined, seem more abstract to begin with, then become more prosaic. His sequences also involve pictures of distorted bits of face on poles, thrust into his space by the other two, the import of which is obscure to me. His freak-out is provoked by the intrusion of his own voice.

But Hadleigh Walker’s rather depressive clown has already spoken at length in white-face (thereby breaking a cardinal convention, purists would say, although the whiteness does corrode over time). His twist on the notion of mime is to read us a children’s story from a blank-paged book, asking us to see the pictures as clearly as we imagine the worlds of the other mimes. The substantive story is both very vivid and very long, and each variation gets shorter, darker and more disturbingly surreal. Then its home in time for tea.

At one stage Bunkall plays out Coll’s scenario, which is fairly interesting, not least because both bring the same flaw to their climbing through a sash window: having heaved the window up to shoulder height they get one leg over the sill then, as they bring the other leg over to fully enter the house, their heads pass through the clearly established window frame. Strange.

Traditional mime shows usually distil the human condition in potent little scenarios that blend comedy with pathos to tickle our ribs and tug at our hearts. This one tends to dilute its core ideas, taking them into other dimensions as if their creators had become bored in the process of devising.  Thus the comic potential dissipates. With little opportunity left for empathy, we become objective in our observation.

Perhaps it just feels a bit underwhelming, or as if it had outstayed its welcome, because A Mime to Kill is more of a meditation on the notion of mime than on the human condition.

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