Okidok, HaHaHa at Southbank CentreRed noses, big shoes, baggy trousers; the publicity shots for Okidok’s HaHaHa promised proper, traditional clowning, and that is what we got. The comic relationship between the endearing Bouvier and Devos was highly sophisticated and clearly honed by many, many years’ play. Perhaps too many years; at times the interactions seemed rather stale, the happy face/sad face interchanges rigmarole rather than new reactions. In fact, one of the funniest moments in the piece came when one clown surprised himself and the other by spitting quite ferociously during a planned outburst. The ensuing 60 seconds or so went joyfully off-script, at once demonstrating the pair’s superb ability to be, well, funny, and showing how very rehearsed the rest of the show is. HaHaHa is made of a series of standalone sketches, in which the pair play with a range of situations, from the most basic (one clown tickles the other, and is reprimanded), to the more abstract (one clown fences himself into a pen, the other wants to be inside it with him), to the downright bizarre – for example the final scene, in which one clown, imagining the audience has left, returns to the stage wearing a hoody over his clown garb, and in order to save face launches into a slapstick hip-hop routine. Different sketches appeal to different levels of humour – which is very clever, but leaves the audience confused at times. There are some lovely images, built up to with perfect timing – from the thoroughly engaging cardboard box scene, in which a simple idea has been explored and crafted into an inventive routine, to a sudden and brief moment near the end of the show, where a shower of beautifully-lit golden confetti falls from a tiny big top onto the balancing duo. The ideas on which the show is based are consistently good ones, but strung together they don’t necessarily all fit. |
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