Creature from the Deep

Trygve Wakenshaw’s name is so awkward and unpronounceable that even he gets it wrong. The Kiwi performer only recently found out that he has mispronounced it his entire life.

He was in Oslo creating Kraken, his new show for this year’s Fringe. In his citrus-sharp New Zealand tones he introduced himself to locals as ‘Trig-vee’. In the guttural baritone of Norwegian, where the name originates, came a correction, with added phlegm. And lo, ‘Treug-veh’, heard his name for the first time.

“I’m probably the only Trig-vee in the world,” he says, not without pride.

It is fitting, then, that the man with the unpronounceable name should be responsible for some of the Fringe’s most indescribable shows. With last year’s hit Squidboy (which is revived again this year), Wakenshaw created something barmy, scattergun and utterly charming. Alone with his generous imagination on stage, his silent clowning built something that fidgeted and wriggled away from description. Try and explain it to friends and words turned to ash in your mouth.

Kraken, he says, is a “spiritual extension” of Squidboy, both in form and its nominal obsession with aquatic invertebrates.

“I tried to write an unwritable show,” he says. “I wanted to structure it more like a piece of music, with motifs and recurring phrases, than like a story. I think I just got bored of narrative a little bit. I just wanted to try and push where I could go without having to tell a story.”

Wakenshaw’s own tale is equally whimsical. Like few before him, he left his native New Zealand in search of a clown school. Armed only with a grant from the government and “blind faith” he attended Philippe Gaulier’s prestigious institution in Paris in 2008, whose alumni includes Doctor Brown, the 2012 winner of the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award.

“The experience was like being turned into a flowerpot and filled with dirt in the hope that a seed was in that dirt,” he says. “Then it, the school, ends and you are left to wonder if that seed will grow or you will forever be dirt.” 

Squidboy was the first sprout to take root. Kraken is the next. Both have been produced by Stephanie Brotchie from the production company Don’t Be Lonely, who, after working with Doctor Brown and 2012’s rather brilliant The Hermitude of Angus, Ecstatic, is fast becoming a giant rubber stamp confirming that a show contains cockle-warming comedic heart.

“Steph Brotchie is the reason I'm back in Edinburgh,” says Wakenshaw. “Sure, Squidboy was wonderful and I'm an extraordinarily talented physical comedy performer on the verge of greatness, but if it wasn't for Steph no-one would have seen it. She makes me want to capture shooting stars and high-five mermaids.”

Kraken is poised to continue the unlikely success of the art form that dare not speak its name: mime. For a creative process that has been lazily lampooned and derided for years, the success of Doctor Brown, The Boy With The Tape On His Face, and now Wakenshaw, signals a remarkable turnaround for the form.

“I couldn't say why this is but it's certainly happening, isn't it?” he says. “I guess it's the natural cultural swing that affects comedy so strongly. Comedy has such a short half-life compared to other arts so it has to keep reinventing. It's probably just a phase. I'm putting my money on contemporary dance as the next big comedy movement.”