The Pianist

The plan is simple: walk on stage, sit down, play the piano. For mime artist and clown Thomas Monckton, dressed in black tie and tails, the execution is a more laboured, hapless and hilarious affair.  

Small acts, like removing the dust sheet from the piano, mutate into surreal reveries as Monckton gets trapped under the sheet, turns his protruding knees into feisty little puppets and plays out a cartoonish fist fight between them. 

His body contorts in ways that seem impossible, with knees bent the wrong way and wrists twisted 360 degrees, and his funny faces complement acrobatic feats like hanging upside down from a chandelier.

Monckton plays with audience familiarity. A concert pianist at a piano is an image we all recognise, but he disrupts our expectations at every turn. As he learns from each mistake—the piano lid that won’t open, the low-hanging chandelier that hits his head—he builds repetition and routine into the show, so that we think we know what’s coming. The joy is in seeing how, again and again, it can all go wrong.

After an excellent start things slow down a little in the middle, but those quieter moments are infrequent. And rather than simply being a succession of broad slapstick and rubbery facial expressions, the show is even rather moving at points. 

Monckton’s great ability, and the show’s great strength, is the way he taps into something universal. After all, what’s funnier—across any language and every culture—than someone falling over?