When words aren't enough

Marcel Marceau was the subject of sniping from jealous rivals while alive. Hopefully in death he will be acclaimed as the master he was, writes his one-time pupil Jack Walsh.

When one of Marcel Marceau's biggest influences, Buster Keaton, died on February 1st, 1966, aged 70, he was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood, with a rosary in one pocket and a deck of cards in the other. "That way," remembered his wife Eleanor, "wherever he was going he was ready."

However, in the 1920s, during a period in which he produced such films as The General, The Navigator and Steamboat Bill Jr, Buster Keaton stood a distant third to Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd in both box office receipts and public acclaim, and it was largely due to the work of Eleanor that, by the time of his death, Keaton's reputation had been restored to the rank of the great film comedians. Perhaps the same might now happen posthumously in the world of mime for Marcel Marceau.

This might come as a surprise to the many who think of him only as the world's most famous mime, always touring to packed houses, but success breeds suspicion and, as in all walks of life, there are politics in mime.

Just as theatre actors fart in the general direction of film and TV actors, so mimes need someone downwind too. And, the mime world being small and rather quiet, one person would do. And it's Marceau who is in it, and all the imitators he has spawned on street corners since the 1960s.

As Marceau's fame peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, revisionism began to fester among the flat-broke mime students (from rival schools - his own school opened in 1978) teeming on the terraces of the more bon marché cafes of Paris. And no one talks more than caffeinated mime students - not speaking for eight hours a day has that effect. The problem was purity. Marceau's mime was held not to be pure, as it came from several influences - Decroux, Dullin, Chaplin, Keaton, silent and expressionist cinema, Noh and kabuki, ballet and acting. And it depended on a certain brio to carry it off.

There was, perhaps, just the slightest hint of envy. The heads of the other main schools in Paris, Étienne Decroux and Jacques Lecoq, were brilliant pedagogues. Both were scientific in their methods of teaching their very different approaches to the art. But neither were performers by nature, as Marceau was, and to this day, though highly regarded in the theatrical world, both are almost unknown to the public at large. They could demonstrate to a packed workshop of admiring students, but the hard sell to a 2,000-seater theatre on the Champs-Élysées, Broadway or the West End was not their forte.

Marceau, by contrast, was a born performer. He had studied the geometric isolations of the body with Decroux, and become his star pupil. He had worked with Jean Louis Barrault and studied acting with Charles Dullin. Already heavily influenced by Chaplin, whose films he had loved since childhood, he was ready to show what his talent could achieve. In 1947 he created Bip, his comic character, named after Pip in Great Expectations. His white face was inspired by Pierrot, a French pantomime addition to commedia dell'arte, who was the son of a baker and whose face was always covered in flour. In fact, if there's one thing that sticks in the craws of anti-Marceauistes more than anything - it's that the white face became synonymous with mime. Even within his school there were mutterings.

He told us once that, in the early days, he had to quickly learn to tailor the size of the gesture to the size of the hall. Just like an actor projecting, a mime has also got to hit the back row. "I can't hear a bloody word!" might have been replaced by a cry of "sounds like?".

But the born entertainer learned quickly and swept all before him. The US beckoned and fell. Soon tours to every continent followed. The phenomenon that was Marcel Marceau was born, and for some, mime was dead.

The French have a saying, rien ne pousse sous un grand arbre (nothing grows under a big tree), and as Marceau became mime, others were forced to the edges of the art, defining their work as "physical theatre" or dance. Illusionary mime - ladders, ropes, glass boxes, and so on - became passé. (Even on the street - everyone's a statue now, do you notice, divil a rope.) The in-crowd mime, synonymous with one man, was no longer cool. For the public at large, if you weren't Marceau you weren't a mime, or at least not the mime.

And so the battle lines were drawn, and this was the main reason Marceau opened his own school in Paris in 1978. He was concerned for his legacy, and saw that those of Lecoq and Decroux were secure, thanks to their teaching abilities. So the school opened and pupils were taught many of the influences that made his mime.

I attended between 1982 and 1985. It was an intense experience. Mondays consisted of 10 hours of acrobatics, ballet, acting and mime. The other days were a mere eight hours. There were four mime teachers, including his nibs. So when he was away on tour we had a chance to improve, so he could blitz us on his return. He wasn't so much a great teacher of technique - the others took care of that - but he came into his own while helping students to hone a number they had prepared. He knew what worked, and his sense of rhythm was unbelievable. It was, in fact, the basis of his art, underlying everything he did, though often unnoticeable.

Yet even we knew that, brilliant training and fantastic experience though it was, the grand arbre loomed over us too. One-man mime was a closed shop. Our tree would have to find a forest. And many did, and much creativity resulted from the necessity to find pastures new.

And Marceau? The truth is probably that he was the right man at the right time, a brilliant virtuoso who captured the zeitgeist after the war, when people wanted entertainment. At a time when the silent movie era was benefitting from the first hint of nostalgia, he brought the joy and effervescence of early Chaplin into people's lives with his comic numbers, while developing a lyrical style over the years. Who can forget his gossiping couple on the park bench in the sketch "Public Garden"; the gothic twist at the end of "The Trial", a comic number that ends in death; the brilliantly simple treatise on life, "Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death"; his portrayal of a man who struggles to show his true face in "The Maskmaker"; or my favourite, and one that used to make me cry, as it seemed to encapsulate his own life, "Bip Remembers"? Considering his father had died in Auschwitz and he had spent the war on the run, there was a lot to remember.

He so captivated the world with an art that had previously remained in the shadows that it's no wonder new generations turned to group work, or (God forbid!) speaking. Marceau used to ask us if, on graduating, we would choose le mime or le théâtre. The political choice was obvious, and Marceau was a political animal, as the crushed hearts of the many not asked back to the school would attest. So we all said "le mime" while fingering our betting slips.

La télévision was not an option, and a favourite of Marceau's was to grimace outlandishly while supposedly imitating how an actor would express himself, and then do it as we - mimes - should: much less grimacing, using the whole body, a dash of rhythm, a sprinkle of suspension (think ballet). His point made, Marceau (he was Monsieur Marceau to his face, Marceau otherwise. This was not cold, more in the honorific way one would say Nureyev or Mozart.

Only family, close friends or brown-nosers would call him Marcel) would wax lyrical about actors he admired. Charles Laughton was a favourite, particularly for his role as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Laurence Olivier also, and he had great regard for Harpo Marx and Stan Laurel. He met Stan near the end of the latter's life, and spoke very fondly of him.

But his god of gods was Chaplin. As the circle began to close on Marceau's life, I heard only recently that much of his time was spent watching Charlie Chaplin films in wonderment.

Au revoir, Marceau, in your pockets you will find the Star of David and a pass for the VIP lounge in Paradise, where awaiting you will be Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel et al. God help any of them who try to get a word in edgeways.

Jack Walsh studied at the École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris Marcel Marceau, 1982 to 1985. He was most recently on screen as Jimmy in Killinaskully, using his skills during Pat Shortt's long speeches or imitating Michael Jackson in a zombie dance