Theatre: Slava’s Snowshow, King’s, Glasgow

Mary Brennan, four stars

A NIP in the November air harbours the prospect of snow. Best to scurry indoors, to the King’s, where the prospect of snow is warmly enticing, thanks to the capricious imaginings – and the profound humanity – of that clown-meister, Slava Polunin.

Twenty-one years ago, Russian-born Polunin brought Snow Show to the Edinburgh Fringe. Compared to the madcap spectacle now touring the world, that production was small scale but nonetheless – with Polunin as the sad sack Everyman and Angela de Castro as his lugubrious, sometimes bolshie foil – the sheer poetic scope of the tragi-comedic antics made audiences reconsider what they understood by the word “clown.” If I cherish those memories, I am abidingly proud that this paper’s 1996 Angel was one of the first awards to recognise the consummate artistry underpinning Snow Show.

Polunin himself no longer assumes the lead clown’s red nose, red furry baffies and voluminous yellow baby sleepsuit. The penguin-suited de Castro has given way to a larky tribe of green-costumed zanies who deploy their long black slap shoes and wacky wing-eared hats to wily, hilarious effect. The material has shape-shifted accordingly and yet the core intent of Snow Show remains, drawing us into the bitter-sweet, Beckettian world of a hapless little outsider for whom the world is a perennial puzzlement. On he toddles, through encounters where he’s out-smarted by irrepressible Green pranksters, overtaken by disappointments - our loner is never lucky in love – but still has enough inner glee to engage mischievously with members of the audience. As night turns into white-out, the snow comes in the now famous blizzard that engulfs us all. An upbeat postscript sees huge balloons descend, bouncing us into the child-like state of play so beloved of Slava himself. How the heart melts…