A successful restaurateur, like a good hotelier, usually has a well developed theatrical streak. The Belgian born and Paris Ecole Internationale de Theâtre Jacques Lecoq trained comic Gaetan Schmid takes this to another dimension with his latest one man performance piece, Rumpsteak.
Playing a myriad of characters, each of which become quickly identifiable by their specific comic trait, Schmid takes the audience on a 35 minutes roller coaster racing to and fro between the chefs in the kitchens and the waiters at the tables. Performed entirely on a small cube, using only a limited number of familiar French words and miming to over 800 audio clips compiled by sound designer extraordinaire James Webb, Schmid’s performance is a master class in split-second comic timing. It’s a marathon feat that leaves one slightly frazzled, as after a good tickle.
Schmid spent time with chef Oded Schwartz and a spell in the kitchen of Rozenhof Restaurant to ensure the accuracy of his mimicry. This entertainment, like an excellent meal, is well worth a second helping.
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When an annoying Australian reporter asked Noël Coward to say something witty, he simply replied, “Kangaroo.” Words are funny things. They conjure up associations and images; they evolve through a series of aberrations, cultural mutations and human selection. Into this fascinating world, The Dog’s Bollocks ventures at a tongue-twisting lick.
It takes a class act like Gaetan Schmid to transform a language lecture into an hilarious one-man show. The trick is to turn the situation inside out. Schmid creates a predicament. Our lecturer is an eccentric Eastern European professor, billed as Dr Emiritus, with a great knowledge of language, but a poor facility for speaking English. We briefly fear the evening will descend in to Volapük. But Emiritus resorts to physical antics, a blackboard, lots of chalk and a condom. In the end, according to this philologist, we discover most words have their origins in sexual connotations.
Schmid is abetted by director Rob Murray, who successfully keeps the pace frenetic and the energy bordering on volatile – an imperative given the undramatic scenario.
Perhaps Schmid stumbled across the title The Dog’s Bollocks when researching his previous popular comedy The Beer Show (Wychwood Brewery in Oxfordshire used to produce an extra special bitter beer called ‘Dog’s Bollocks’). In both these comedies, Schmid irreverently traces the entire history of Western man, including his civilising mission. This is the most successful part of the show: when Schmid has a dramatic thread and is able to relate the evolution of a word to a mini-storyline. In the Beer Show there was a Babylonian discovering his fermenting hops; here we have the colonists misunderstanding the aborigines before killing them off, and by implication their language too.
The script is quite a feat of imagination, not to forget recall, stringing together as it does an hour-long web of words, driven by associations. The challenge for Schmid is to somehow do this and tell one story. Then he’ll have a tour de force.
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I originally saw Belgian theatre artist Gaetan Schmid perform his self-authored The Beer Show subtitled – the history of humankind seen through a beer glass – at the Obz Café. It was good then and has even tightened up since. It is now a neat, well-honed and well-target package. Chris Weare directs.
Schmid traces what is an obsession amongst his fellow nationals – beer (all in all there are probably a thousand different varieties in Belgium) from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia with his character Shôn the Sumerian who discovered the first brewing techniques; to the Pharaohs and Jesus; to Emperor Domitius, a power hungry Roman colonizer and his horse; the mad Benedictine monks in their laboratories; the Industrial Revolution; globalisation and the rise of the multinational corporations with the demise of beer through greed and carbonation; to today’s Underground Beer Revolution spearheaded by the microbrewery.
Schmid is a consummate clown steeped in the physical vocabulary of European performance. His subtle humour is eccentric, intelligent, yet easily accessible. Particularly heartening is his laissez faire approach to excess and in times where tolerance of religious intolerance threatens to reverse the progress man has made in his intellectual journey through history, Schmid’s impiety and post-Enlightenment irreverence is hugely welcome and refreshing.
The Incredible Beer Show remains a frothy ferment of imagination and distilled history.
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