Trygve Wakenshaw was surely destined to be a clown from the day his parents named him. Just look at it, there at the head of the paragraph. That’s a funny name, isn’t it? I bet you’re already laughing. See the way the letters lean on each other, bits poking out here, lines dangling down there. That’s the alphabetical embodiment of the man, a consonant-heavy smudge of nominative determinism.
He’s a jelly giraffe stuffed into human skin, all flailing limbs and exquisitely elastic gestures. Before the show begins, he can be seen wriggling in the air backstage. It looks fun. It is fun. Indeed, fun is a terrifically apt word to describe Kraken. Other appropriate words include hilarious, absurd, joyful, kinetic and kaleidoscopic. To call it mime doesn’t do it justice, although it is mime (especially in the original sense of ‘a buffoon who practices gesticulations’). But Wakenshaw approaches his art with a faux-naïve child-like glee, especially when he breaks the rules – accidentally or by design; our not knowing is part of the charm – and breaks out his voice.
In this respect he recalls the wonderful Doctor Brown, with whom he shares a clowning education from the prestigious school of Phillipe Gaulier. But where Brown is openly confrontational, Wakenshaw is impishly playful; where Brown is divisive, and seems to relish audience walkouts, Wakenshaw rejoices in uniting his audience, flirtatiously spreading the love.
As he chameleonically morphs his way around the stage, mimicking an initially unrelated stream-of-consciousness string of ludicrous sketches – from a newborn elephant taking its first steps to a baby bird waiting for its first meal, from a sword-wielding, heartbreaking rake to a pompously deadlifitng bodybuilder – his skins grows shiny with sweat and the air grows thick with his protean physicality. Although he makes everything look impulsive, spontaneous, he is clearly in control.
The audience, however, isn’t. Uncontrollable laughter rings out consistently, from all over the sold out crowd. I almost gave up attempting to put my glasses back on after removing them to wipe away tears of laughter three, eleven, twenty-nine times? I lost count. I didn’t want it to end.
BY MELANIE SHERIDAN
