I Hate Mime
Chris Willems
Price Theatre

Chris Willems says he hates mime but nothing could be further from the truth. What he hates is the fact that white mime has become so refined that it has lost all its nutrients.

I Hate Mime is Willems’ third solo show and it follows Son of Romeo, his highly successful lip readers’ digest of Romeo and Juliet. Though unlike Romeo, with its familiar narrative, Willems’ new work is a more fractured flicker.

The opening skit is a curious one. Slow to the point of inertia, it is comic and sinister as Willems, wearing a skinny black suit and a loopy pair of red-framed shades, strikes. a series of satiric New Wave poses followed by some disconcertingly obsessive furniture arranging. It is skilful with some of the quirky absurdities of performance art.

Then with some rapid changes in metabolic rate Willems returns to the stage with a life-size photographic portrait of the artist as a young mime which he mockingly surrounds with fingersigns anatomising the elements of the mime person – ‘knees that bend’, ‘body of a greyhound’, ‘hands that speak’ and, most important of all, ‘mime boots’.

Willems lets us in on more trade secrets with an extended demonstration of the principles of mime. “People say it is exaggeraged movement,” his earnest persona intones, “but is the antithesis of that.” The full weight of his theorizing is then enacted as he takes us step by step through the act of vomiting. It is funny but bitter as well – “sincerity is paramount”, he insincerely snickers, “you must vomit from the ankles.”

Willems is ambivalent about mime but someone who really hates it from the tip of his texta is Patrick Cook. When he was putting the show together, Willems wrote to Cook asking whether he had any cartoons he could use and in reply received a dozen or so eloquently wordless gags of a street mime performer whose craft and sullen art is under siege from pissing dogs, loquacious drunks and other instances of vandalised illusion. Understandably wanting to highlight Cook’s work, Willems has a series of sketches which illustrate or elaborate on the cartoons but by interspersing them throughout the show he is perhaps too reverent. The jokes themselves are too laconic to be performed and would have been better concentrated into a single item.

They do, however, provide Willems with an opportunity for a morceau of Marcel bashing. In his “Day in the Life of a (Very) Famous Mime,” dressed in the stripy shirt and black tights of the Prince of Whiteness, he mercilessly does the treadmill walking and the Wall – or rather, the Ledge, as he teeters on the abyss of mime’s theatrical repetitions.

Willems has made interesting use of film in I Hate Mime – with footage prepared in Adelaide by CoMedia, he augments his live performance with film of talking-head knees, and other sight gags, which run a bit long here and there, but work effectively against any brittle sense of minimalism. Stuart Day’s skilful music also gives the show a fuller dimension and underlines the fact that I Hate Mime is intended to entertain.

Willems’ first show was entitled A Bit of Humour, Bit of Pathos, Bit of Art.

I Hate Mime could be called A Bit of Whimsy, Bit of Satire, Bit of Art. The best bit of art, for my money, is the lecture from Professor Christopher Herbert Williams on the aetiology and treatment of osteomyelitis. In describing the symptoms and processes, the Professor gets himself quite queasy but the Pythonish comedy shifts neatly to the more reflective perspective of the patient, a small frail boy facing a painful operation and months in traction.

It is inimical to mime to lower the mask and reveal the actor, or his or her direct experience, yet this the wellspring of comedy and Willems’ use of autobiography is well-calculated. In fact the show could carry one more piece which is similarly not undercut with defensive ironies. In his fear of self-indulgence Willems resorts too readily to satire and ridicule which can be as self-effacing as the classic mime he is rejecting.

Chris Willems is a talented and intelligent performer and the ingredients in his new show indicate creative new directions for him. While not greater than the sum of its parts, I Hate Mime takes great risks, is dangerously original and deserves a look.

“First Person Singular” The Adelaide Review, No. 38, May 1987. p.21.