Marcel Marceau, the man who makes silence speak more eloquently than words, returned to Dublin last week after an absence of 20 years. He is in his late seventies now, and apparently thought he might be forgotten here. His reception, a prolonged ovation of near-hysterical dimensions, dismissed the notion - and many of the audience were manifestly too young to have seen him before.
It was earned by two hours of mesmeric performance, a revelation of the possibilities of mime. Marceau classified his pieces in two groups, the first called Pantomimes of Style. With The Creation of the World the artist's scope became manifest. His lithe body, limbs with a graceful life of their own, hands that fluttered to become winged or growing things, created hypnotic illusions.
The Public Garden focused on people, a host of them. The strutting keeper twirling his mustache, an old woman knitting, an elderly busker, a woman with pram - an entire parade passed by. In The Maskmaker, a man displayed startlingly different expressions by rapid facial contortions, and was agonisingly locked into a final one, a macabre rictus.
Then to Pantomimes of Bip, the character most associated with Marceau from the beginning. Think of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Don Quixote, Pierrot and their peers; he is all of them, and always himself. Here he was a street musician, a client in a matrimonial agency and many others. His white-faced, red-mouthed persona is ageless; and so, by simple definition, is his creator.
It was a privilege to have Marcel Marceau with us again, and pleasant to hope that the warmth of his reception may persuade him to return soon.