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by Mark Brownell, directed by Sue Miner

Pea Green Theatre Group, Next Stage Theatre Festival, Factory Theatre, Toronto

January 4-15, 2017

Clothilde: “An audience is like sheep”

Pea Green Theatre has premiered Mark Brownell’s latest play at the Next Stage Theatre Festival.  For those who loved Medici Slot Machine (2006) and especially Three Men in a Boat (2014), Brownell’s new Clique Claque will come as a disappointment.  It examines a fascinating subject that promises numerous theatrical possibilities.  But after, Brownell turns away from exploring these for a meandering narrative that fizzles out at the end. 

Brownell’s subject is the “claque”, a group of people planted in an audience and paid to cheer, boo or otherwise react to a play, an opera or to a specific performer.  The practice became an institution in Paris from 1830 on.  Brownell first introduces us to wife and husband Clothilde and Yannick (Michelle Langille and Robert Clarke) who as chefs de claque run an agency for “claqueurs”.  In the first and most effective third of the play, Clothilde treats the audience as a group of the unemployed gathered to learn the art of the claque – that is, how to perform the required various levels of applause, laughter, shock, delight and displeasure.  Clothilde uses her sister Clemantine (Thalia Kane) as her model, then has the audience itself display on command what it has learned.

All this leads one to believe that Brownell will explore how audience reactions can be manipulated and proceed to make us more self-conscious about how we react as we do and why.  Unfortunately, after this fun bit of interaction, audience participation is over for the rest of the show.  Clothilde asks us as claqueurs if we want to stay to learn more, but instead of further instruction or practice, Brownell shifts into a fitfully humorous narrative about the self-exiled young Canadian musician Victor (Victor Pokinko) who gets involved with the chefs de claque.

Victor immediately falls in love with the mysterious Clemantine, who, in fact, is not Clothilde’s sister but claims that the chefs de claque have now enslaved both her and Victor.  We never learn exactly how or why this is true.  Just when this plot is heating up, Brownell shifts to another.  In this the chefs de claque find their efforts are being undermined by a clique of university students led by Dubosc (Ron Kennell).  Dubosc’s clique hates the idea of the claque and attempts to expose the poor performers who use the claque to increase their reputation.  What remains unclear is how Dubosc’s clique of unpaid booers is any different in manipulating an audience from the claque of paid applauders.

To put Dubosc out of commission, the chefs de claque require that Victor, who thinks he is straight, seduce the openly gay Dubosc and lure him to their residence.  The value of this dead end of a plot twist is that it happens to supply the second funniest sequence of scenes in the play.

By the end it appears that the point of the play has been for Clothilde to convey, by seeing into the future, the insight that claques will be built in to people’s experiences online.  Brownell’s omits to note that cliques will also still exist in the future of entertainment.  The point of the Victor plot seems to be an elaborate joke, one the opening night audience didn’t seem to get, that Victor will later be immortalized as the title character of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.  It might have helped if Victor had had a mask.

Although the story goes astray what makes the show watchable are the lively performances of the cast.  Robert Clarke is funny as the perpetually grumpy Yannick as is Langille as Clothilde, who tries to give an elevated tone to the base profession she teaches.  Kane is amusing as Clemantine, whose pose of innocence is a simple façade, but the most hilarious performance of all comes from Pokinko, who is an expert at depicting in such a winning fashion a combination of naïveté, awkwardness, embarrassment, weakness and short-term resolve.  The next most vivid character is Kennell’s Dubosc, a worldly-wise bon vivant eager to induct the hesitant Victor into a more exciting way of life.

Clique Claque has such a promising theme and such interesting characters that it is too bad Brownell has not been able to turn them into a more tightly structured play with a potent conclusion.  To keep the self-awareness of the claque instruction scene going I was fully expecting that Brownell would have Clothilde judge our performance reacting as a claque reacting to a play acted on stage.  That play could very well have been the Victor-Clemantine-Dubosc plot.  Clique Claque is ripe for revision and one hopes Brownell can bring it closer to the high level of his other works.                              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photo: Michelle Langille as Clothilde and Robert Clarke as Yannick. ©2017 Mark Brownell.

For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com/next-stage-festival.