CLOWNING has its roots in streets and market squares. Its natural audience, the hoi-polloi, revel in its pathetic grotesquery, reassured that with clowns around they still have a long way to fall. But once put on stage, clowns risk becoming animals in captivity dreaming of the streets they have left behind.
The five-clown troupe of St Petersburg's Licedei Minus Four showed their restlessness at being cut off from the crowds by grabbing at the audience at every opportunity - yanking them on stage, crawling over them, and hitting them with giant carnival hammers. At the heart of Moumie was classic slapstick clowning - the red nosed, white faced buffoonery, the dropped pants and buckets of confetti tipped over gasping front row heads.
But the really interesting elements of their performance were forms more native to the stage than to the street - a surreal mime theatre which showed glimpses of being really quite stunning.
The extraordinary Valeri Keft, who looks like he's been drawn into existence by Edward Lear or Heinrich Hoffman, extended the performance well beyond the confines of traditional clowning. As a standard lamp, sporting a fringed lampshade complete with illuminated light bulb, he created a mad Strindbergian tableau in which, bored with shedding light on his master's book, he shoots himself. This was refined insanity of the highest order.
Later we were treated to a divinely dotty bucolic scene. Here, to luscious Celtic harp music, Valery wandered through a conjured countryside with a large white hare whose head kept swivelling away from the panoramas he so earnestly wished to share with it. More please.
The troupe has been at pains to inform us that their Hong Kong performance, Moumie, is not for children - yet the children sprinkled about the audience loved it. But I suspect they loved different bits from their parents. It was a little like watching a Spielberg blockbuster which has parts for the grown-ups and parts for the kiddies.