Slava's Snowshow

Slava's Snowshow is fast on its way to becoming as much a London Christmas staple as carols in Trafalgar Square or the seasonal Harrods window display. It's a completely unique and joyous event that asks you to leave your adult cares and concerns at the door and step into a place of childlike wonder and delight. Irony and cynicism? Go and open a newspaper. Story? Go and see A Christmas Carol. What you do get is to watch performers at play and losing themselves so merrily in that play.

Aside from one moment when one actor with a highly suspicious butter-wouldn’t-melt wide-eyed innocence whispered that it “looked like rain”, barely an intelligible word is spoken throughout the show’s entire running time. I say intelligible as whole sequences are framed around conversations spoken in complete gobbledigook. Indeed some moments look like complete anarchy as the actors roam about the auditorium while others are very tightly choreographed.

However the whole spirit of the show is so infectiously open-hearted and generous that it never lays itself open to the charge of self-indulgence. And just when the madness almost threatens to become overbearing, Slava Poulin pulls out a moment of pure transcendental beauty. A golden balloon rises to the sky, a girl swings high into the air as the moon leaps behind her. These are breathless moments. Admittedly, there were moments when I craved a semblance of narrative to help see my way through all this inspired madness but the show’s sheer childlike exuberance carries all before it.

Clowning has received a lot of attention of late not least from top winners at this year’s Edinburgh festival. But if The Boy With the Tape on his Face and Doctor Brown feel like an adolescent mischief-maker up to all manner of trouble behind the bikesheds, Slava most often resembles the kid at the party who wants to jump up and down and play a game with you. It’s only in the production’s final stages that more adult sensibilities creep in but far from prurience, we have the heart-rending obstacles of love and loss. All of this is handled lightly and delicately before a finale which would probably break the reviewer’s rulebook to give away but is sure to leave you stunned.

As the show came to a close, I noticed Slava, the oldest clown, perch quietly on the side of the stage and with what seemed like an expression of true and profound content, look out on the happiness he’d given us. Ten minutes later as I walked home, I saw a very young audience member, beaming from ear to ear, with her bowler hat full up to the brim with snow from the show. She was handing it out to to the commuters at Waterloo station. Merry Christmas.

-by James Fielding