Clown school
I once accidentally signed up to go to clown school in Italy. I had just finished university. I knew I wanted to do something in comedy, but I barely had the strength to believe it was possible, let alone chase it. Saying out loud that I thought I was not just funny, but funny enough to be professionally paid for it, felt like announcing to the world like I was going to be a supermodel. I felt so weak, like hope for the future was something I didn’t have the muscles to lift.
I had always wanted to be an actress. I tried to get into drama schools in Dublin but for some reason, now lost in the fog of that past, I decided to exclusively audition with monologues written for women in their sixties. If you're wondering what a 17-year-old delivering a speech at full pelt about the heartbreak of a son emigrating to the US is like, know this, during one audition, a member of a drama school panel started laughing so loudly, I had to stop mid flow, so he could compose himself. Then he asked me for a recent film that inspired me and I replied with complete sincerity and earnestness “Addams Family Values”.
So instead of drama school I went to university. Like most working-class people ‘going to college’ had promised to be a life changing event. Every single film I’d seen always had ‘go to university’ as the magical genie in a lamp moment. I was confident that if acting didn’t work out, my fall back careers would be magazine journalist, woman working in an unspecified corporate job or famous author. But I hadn’t really liked university and had never really fit in. So, now I was back in my hometown, with a degree in English, trained to do absolutely nothing, applying for the same jobs I’d applied for before I left. Teacher training hung like a guillotine over my head. I felt like I was being buried alive. I felt the oldest I have ever felt in my life.
So, when I saw a course advertised for a physical comedy course on a noticeboard, I thought, “It's time to escape Dodge City!” Of course, I didn’t think I was funny enough to be a comedian. I was simply going on a clown course in Italy. For 10 weeks. How absolutely normal. Nothing to see here.
It was only when I got there that I quickly discovered three very important facts: firstly, it wasn’t the comedy acting that I thought it was (clicking heels, Charlie Chaplin leaps and pratfalls) it was Commedia dell’Arte (folk theatre based on stock characters, basically mediaeval Benny Hill); second, I was the only person there from Ireland or the UK; and thirdly, everyone else was a classically trained professional actor/dancer/gymnast.
The man running the course was an extremely intense Italian theatrical maestro in his sixties. He began each class speaking in Italian, then Spanish, then French, then English but as the course unravelled and he fell out with various factions, he cut their language from the class. English, sad to say, was the first to go. So now I was learning a style of theatre I knew nothing about entirely through languages I did not speak, for a reason I did not know.
Did I mention that everyone else in the class was basically in Cirque du Soleil? We had an acrobatics class where a handstand was the starting position. In the first session, we had to line-up and one by one do a cartwheel. Have you ever been in a position where twenty of the most beautiful, lithe, encouraging people you have ever met think you can't do a cartwheel, not because you lack basic core muscles but because you lack confidence, so they stop everything to cheer you on? They look at you, eager-eyed, believing in, willing you to succeed! And for a split second, caught up in the moment, you believe you can do it too, maybe it IS just a case of facing your fear? So gee’d up on the clapping of the crowd you leap towards the gym mat, push away from the floor and then collapse heavily and painfully on top of yourself, in front of a now extremely quiet room full of people avoiding your gaze.
Or a tango class that starts with the girls and boys on either side and the girls have to one by one, lock eyes with a boy, walk over towards him, in front of the entire class, while dancing sexily? And it’s your turn and you get two shimmies across the floor before telling the whole room that you have to go to the toilet and just never coming back?
I had one salvation; none of these beautiful, kind, flexible creatures were from the UK or Ireland. Again, remember, I figured out on day two that I did not find Commedia dell’Arte funny. What if though, instead of actually learning how to play the characters properly, truly improvising, pushing myself outside my comfort zone, I borrowed some ideas I knew but no one else did? Readers: I STOLE. I stole scenes, characters, actual dialogue from the best British and Irish sitcoms and sketch shows of the past thirty years. I lived the life of the Yesterday film but instead of being the only person who remembers The Beatles, I got to be the only person who had ever watched UKTV Gold. “Does anyone want to go up next?” Yes, I think I will, first up, every time! With another one of my seemingly never-ending Mary Poppins bag of characters! The doomed yet crafty WWI soldier who always had a “cunning plan”, the drunken PR guru trying to act younger who slurred “absolutely fabulous” “suits you sir!”, a dim-witted priest who couldn’t tell the difference between something being near and far away. I felt like a god.
My headline performance.
The course unravelled on the final night. By then our teacher had fallen out with every single person on the course (except for me, as the only time I spoke was when I improvised yet another moment of comedy genius). He gave an incendiary leaving speech in Italian, denouncing us all for betraying him, saying we were doomed forever to be his students and walking out to silence. We all gathered, shellshocked in our apartment. French Canadian, American, Spanish, Finnish, Spanish, Italian and German. They were the most beautiful people I had ever met in my life. People were packing, nobody had slept, and I was on the balcony of our apartment, heartbroken. I didn’t want it to end, I didn’t want to go home. Everyone else was heading back to their glamorous lives of fringe theatre and plays. I was returning to my certain fate; training to be a teacher, never leaving my hometown, never escaping. A Finnish girl came out to check on me. Imagine the most beautiful stereotype you have about Nordic people and that’s what she was like, she saw I was upset and gave me a hug. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I didn’t know how to even describe the doom that was descending, I was so scared that this was going to be the last time I got to feel creative, young and alive, I was scared that I was never going to meet people like them again, I was scared UKTV Gold was going to be a channel on their flights home and I was about to be busted. So, I just said “I’ll just miss being around people like you, you're all such…” I searched for a word that could show how special I thought they all were. “…bohemians”. And I remember the certainty in her voice when she replied, “But you're a bohemian too”. Maybe she was just being kind. Like the time she told me I could do a cartwheel. But she said it in such a matter of fact way. Like it was obvious. She gave me hope, that although I was definitely a liar, maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t a fraud.
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