Clowns have had some bad press over the years. Think of Krusty 'heartily endorsing this event or product' in The Simpsons or Tim Curry dragging small children off into the sewers as Stephen King's IT. What's more, cliche repeatedly casts clowns as depressives who are all crying on the inside.
'It almost feels like it's not fair how much fun it is to do what I do,' says Hilary Chaplain. But then, she hardly conforms to the stereotype. For a start, she's female, and more like a favourite drama teacher than an in-your-face entertainer - and she's strongly opposed to the big shoes/tiny unicycle school of clowning. She even hesitates to use the word. 'I know that when people hear 'clown' they think of floppy shoes and rainbow wigs,' she says. 'But I have never, and will never, do anything like that.'
As Chaplain describes what she calls the true nature of clowning, she oozes the energy of her adopted home, New York. 'The art of the clown is about the vulnerability of the human being, the little man/woman against the world,' she says. 'The clown makes mountains out of molehills and constantly comes out ahead, but in their own way.'
A good example is one of Chaplain's earlier pieces, in which she did 'a serious monologue from Shakespeare wearing a black dress, pearls and high heels'. Needless to say, 'one of the heels breaks and I'm walking crooked, then the pearls break and my clothes fall down and my hair falls out ... but I finish that monologue.'
This tension between theatrical respectability and good old-fashioned belly laughs has informed Chaplain's career. Despite studying mime, clowning and other aspects of physical theatre under experts such as Tony Montanaro, Fred Garbo and Bob Berkely in the late 1970s, Chaplain still desperately 'wanted to be a serious actress doing serious theatre'.
These ambitions were fulfilled with positions in repertory theatre throughout the 80s, and high-profile work such as a Broadway performance of The Tempest with Patrick Stewart (1995) and a role as a feminist anti-war protester in Forrest Gump (1994). 'It was great,' she says. 'But I saw a lot of unhappy actors. The world of 'legitimate acting' isn't necessarily a healthy, happy place.'
Even so, her latest show, A Life in Her Day, started out as 'an actor's piece about the journey of a woman who didn't want to be a clown', before her mentors told her: 'Hilary, the work is great, but we just want to see the clown stuff'. Since then she's performed the piece in LA, New York, Prague and Melbourne, and it's become 'one character's day, where she creates a whole new world out of the elements around her.'