Marcel (Shaw Theatre)

They say the old ones are the best. Marcel – opening this year’s London International Mime Festival – puts that to the test with a string of classic slapstick routines played by two aging clowns.

Jos Houben and Marcello Magni, long-time Complicite collaborators, are now pushing 60. They’re no longer the springy physical specimens of their youth. Houben, a long-limbed Belgian, has lost the naivety that made his clown tick, while Magni, now short, bald and tubby, hasn’t the impishness of his youth. As people change, so their clowns have to adjust.

Marcel is, in part, about that process. It wonders what happens to performers of a certain age. Do clowns seize up with age or do they get funnier?

Houben plays an examiner; Magni, an oldie arriving for his human MOT. Cue missed handshakes and misunderstood instructions. On a half-corkscrew ramp, Magni’s put through his paces, but what might once have been easy is harder these days. Every step he takes, he trips and every trip he makes, he flies smack bang into something. It’s vintage stuff.

Magni’s a sad-sack in a shabby cream suit; foolish because his baseball cap belongs on a much younger head; poignant because an old man deserves better. There’s more to life, surely, than a series of tests? As one gets older, one becomes redundant. A marcel, in France, is a working man’s white vest.

It’s all exceedingly gentle: too slow to muster mounting delirium, too stiff to make us marvel, and yet, somehow chucklesome regardless – a case of timing and charm. Younger men would never get away with this stuff. We’d demand virtuosity or reinvention: a personal stamp on a classic. Houben and Magni, by contrast, can trot through the old favourites quite happily: there’s old twisted arm behind the back, the old plastic bottle cracked neck and the old rigor mortis routine – leg down, arm up, ha ha ha. We laugh no matter how corny the gags, but that laughter depends on fondness.

It gradually shifts into classical shapes, notably the Pierrot of commedia del’arte. Magni, a newspaper sheet for a collar, beckons down the moon and transforms it into a hat, a harp and a boat. Marcel’s a case for enduring comic forms – jokes that will outlive us all.

Marcel runs at the Shaw Theatre, as part of the London International Mime Festival, until 12 January.

Read our round up of the best mime festival shows here