At a corner table in a Parisian cafe James Thierrée is swivelling around in his seat. He’s on the lookout for his morning coffee, he explains, swinging back with a raspy laugh. Thierrée has created a series of beguiling stage shows and today has the air of an inventor with his white jacket, round specs and floppy fringe of salt and pepper curls.
His latest concoction is Room, which is on a European tour winding its way to the Edinburgh international festival (EIF) in August. By then, Thierrée explains, his Room will have been somewhat rearranged. “I never want them to be bored,” he says of the musicians and dancers who perform its loose-limbed melee of skits and tricks in a huge salon that is constructed before us on stage then promptly blown apart. “Every afternoon we switch a piece of music. I warned everyone it’s going to be moving all the time.” He assumes the roles of architect and director in the story, attempting to marshal his surroundings but constantly upended by them.
Thierrée’s visually arresting shows – including Tabac Rouge and The Toad Knew – usually come with threadbare plots. This time, the connection between musical instruments and the instrument of the human body was his starting point for an exploration of “the whim of pleasure and music and nonsense”. His pick ’n’ mix collection of performers arrived for rehearsals in 2020 only to return home the following day because of rising Covid cases. Now, he hopes the piece will chime with pandemic-weary audiences who want to let go a little – although the single-room setting is bound to prompt flashbacks to lockdown. “Those bloody walls!” he groans, remembering his spell of isolation.
In the absence of plot, he likes to give the audience a tempo. “We can follow a beat,” he says, explaining that we are not just creatures of intellect but of “rhythm and unconscious yearnings”. If there is a philosophy to the show, he says, it is to “embrace chaos”. Did he give his performers similar advice for the creation process? “I try to tell them it should be about their head, too. If all I do is direct my dream, it’s kind of a lonely process. I need their madness.” The production has become a cultural exchange of sorts: the musicians roam around the stage, guided by Thierrée, while he is singing on stage for the first time.
“Usually I’m just a guy moving,” he says, somewhat underselling his incredible dexterity. But the rehearsals raised a question: “How about this movement produces a voice too?” Before long he was adding dialogue in various languages and rapping. But none of this should be a surprise, he says. “When you come from circus you try stuff – trapeze, acrobatics, juggling … You just put your hands on something and you shake it and see what happens.”
This attitude is one inheritance from his illustrious family tree. Thierrée is the great-grandson of Eugene O’Neill, the grandson of Charlie Chaplin and the son of Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin, with whose travelling circus he and his sister Aurélia performed from a young age. He glows as he recalls a world where “the act is just the act – a proposal and a response”. In music hall, “anyone with an idea could be a star. That used to fascinate me. Someone could do some funny stuff with a cigar and do that act for 20 years.”
Chocolat, the 2016 film directed by Roschdy Zem and starring Thierrée, explored the durability of those traditions amid changing tastes and new technologies. In it he plays George Foottit, who teams up with Rafael “Chocolat” Padilla (Lupin’s Omar Sy), for a clowning act in belle époque Paris. Both give superb performances – Thierrée is brooding and inscrutable, bottled up for almost the entire movie until he bursts into a smile in its bittersweet climax. The film closes with archive footage of the real-life Foottit and Chocolat performing their act. How much of Thierrée’s own work has been recorded? “I’ve been really bad at it,” he grimaces. Archive recordings serve a purpose but he is sceptical about the artistic merits of filmed theatre – “the beauty of it is that it is ephemeral”, he suggests. “That’s our lot: we need to be very bright and then fade with our absence from stage.”
Playwrights and choreographers leave a legacy in the scripts and steps they create that are handed on to future interpreters. Thierrée’s productions are perhaps trickier to preserve. “Do we need to leave a trace?” he asks. “My grandfather left a trace that is ongoing. From our perspective, it’s fantastic. From his perspective, I don’t know – he’s gone. He can’t enjoy it any more.”
Chaplin managed the transition from vaudeville to silver screen with spectacular success; the music-hall acts in Chocolat fear their artform will be eclipsed by cinema. A century on, it’s the streaming giants who pose a threat but Thierrée still champions the unrivalled mystery of the stage as its USP. “You have to get inside that theatre and take a risk.” His productions become love letters to theatre itself. “It’s a temple and it’s also extremely simple,” he marvels. “The rules of the game in the theatre have always stayed the same, technically. You don’t need many years of training to understand how theatre works: sound, light, set. And yet it keeps renewing. It’s a beautiful subject.” If he ever writes a novel, he says, it will have a stage setting. “Maybe an Agatha Christie inside the theatre,” he cackles.
In the meantime he is finishing a screenplay, entitled Grog, that he will direct. It’s an attempt to find a cinematic language that corresponds to the stage work he has created with Compagnie du Hanneton, the outfit he formed in 1998. “Ninety per cent of what I do in theatre I can’t take into cinema,” he reflects. As an actor, his films have ranged from the blockbuster The Emperor of Paris, starring Vincent Cassel, to quirky indies such as Bartleby, Andreas Honneth’s 2010 adaptation of Herman Melville’s story. The latter had a handmade quality, blending silent film techniques, stage trickery and eccentric object theatre in a manner not dissimilar to Thierrée’s shows. His role as Melville’s scrivener, who adopts the line “I would prefer not to” as a menacing mantra, brilliantly matched his beatific yet brooding countenance.
Moonlighting in the movies has, he says, “nourished” his work in theatre. “Being an instrument for the director is interesting – being at the service of someone else’s vision. In my company it’s almost overwhelming how free I am. I don’t even have a play to be faithful to.” He describes the film roles as little missions, whereas he has inhabited the world of Room for more than two years now – and will do for several months yet on the road.
For Thierrée, the apartment in the show is a character with its own agenda – “more than just your own needs” – and, like any room, evokes memories of past occupiers. Much like theatre buildings themselves, then, providing a space for companies to move in, make their mark and move on? He smiles. “Oui, c’est ça.”
Room is touring Europe and is at the King’s theatre, Edinburgh, from 13 to 17 August as part of the Edinburgh international festival. Chris Wiegand’s trip to France was paid for by EIF.
