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whose work they honoured in Help I’m Alive! (1990), they are anarchists of the city; they speak for the urban dumbos, deadbeats and dispossessed in a world where ugliness is endemic and dignity a luxury confined to the rich. Again like the Commedia, they animate a theatre of survival, the survival of the poor. Founded in 1983 by Annabel Arden, Simon Mcßurney, Marcello Magni and the Canadian actress Fiona Gordon, joined in 1985 by the producer Catherine Reiser, Complicité is a core-collective which visiting members join, leave and rejoin; the English rodent-intensity of Mcßurney and the generous latin explosiveness of Magni are tempered, for example, by the startling and ethereal Linda Kerr Scott; by ex-squaddie Tim Barlow (the one who looks like Gladstone); or by Kathryn Hunter and Lilo Baur, who in Help! played, respectively, a pot-bellied businessman and the object of his desires, a tarty Italian wife with filed teeth, streching a Lycra dress where no Lycra dress had ever gone before, and swinging winsomely off a ceilling and two walls. Every actor who plays with the company is individually eccentric, some have star-quality, yet none disturbs the sanity of the ensemble. Many have studied in Paris with Jacques Lecoq from whom they learned that »stage presence« - the truthfulness of the actor in and with his own body - is no mystery given of withheld at birth, but a skill to be taught and learned. Intellectual and physical understanding are separate disciplines: British performers are instinctively good at the first, but find the second harder. The actor’s imagination creates theatre as much as those of the writer or director - a faith more European than British to which Complicité, like Peter Brook and Mike Alfreds (the founder of Shared Experience) unquestioningly adhere. Without the commitment of each actor to his colleagues the company, family and team would cease to be. If these ideas are taking hold in the younger generation of British actors, it is partly due to eleven years of classes, workshops, and exemplary performances by Theatre de Complicité. The collective devises its own shows around a universal theme and in the cases of The Visit and The Winter’s Tale around an existing text-through months of argument, rehearsal and research. An idea may germinate from objects idly found; a cache of flowery bathing hats in Brick Lane market led eventually to Pur It On Your Head (1983) »A show about the English seaside« and tire social agonies of Englishness on the beach; or it may grow from personal experience, like grief for the death of Mcßurney’s father after which the Company collected »death objects« for months and came up with A minute Too Late (1984) which even they, at a safe distance of several exorcising years, now call their

»smash hit show about death«. More Bigger Snacks Now (1985) was born in the Limehouse days when Mcßurney, Neil Bartlett and other melancholy, unemployed actors had sifted broken dreams round an electric fire and consoling records of Callas in Bellini’s Norma; Please Please Please (1986), in which unspeakable things were done with food and an eiderdown by a birdlike old couple at Christmas, began, says Mcßurney, as »a show about love, then sex, then the family, then hate«. Please had the lot. In 1988, with Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit, a revenger’s comedy and masterpiece of post-war European theatre, they tackled the finite text of an established writer for the first time. It was an inspired choice. The Visit is also a comedy of survival, the survival of the bourgeoisie who come through on reserves of infinite corruptibility rather than the energies of desperation that inspire the working class. Complicite’s total respect for it was almost as startling as the violent physical language which they developed to visualise and reinforce its harsh, ironic power. Complicité lived with the play, on and off, for more than three years, modifying, changing and intensifying their dark comic vision of it with each revival, just as material is added to their wholly devised shows from all manner of sources in a kind of theatrical collage. The Street of Crocodiles (1992), a narrative of missionary disruptiveness, wit and power, was assembled from the life and irrepressible writings of the Polish Jew Bruno Schulz, whom the Holocaust swept away. It took them up another notch and with The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994) and Out of a house walked a man... (1994) shows developet respectively from the writings of John Berger and Daniil Kharms - out into the wider world. The zealots arrived in the major touring theatres and in London’s West End. Everything Complicité actors do is rooted in what they have heard and seen. This is a theatre of bodily functions and impulses, of class-defences and universal desires. Its logic is merciless, its techniques virtuoso, its energy without bounds. It is rude and funny and fearful, for inside the vortex of frenzy the individual is always alone. ■ Michael Ratcliffe

THEATRE DE COMPLICITE - AWARDS 1995 The Age Newspaper Critics Award for Creative Excellence for The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol. Melbourne International Festival 1995 Munich Star of the Year Award (Simon Mcßurney)