THEATER

Theater for a New Audience
DOUBLE BILL: A PAIR OF COMIC ONE-ACTS

MARCEL  - Created by and Featuring Jos Houben and Marcello Magni

"From Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Parisian home of Peter Brook, comes a poignant two-hander about the collision of clowning and mortality. Jos Houben and Marcello Magni, who starred in Samuel Beckett’s Fragments at TFANA, are comic masters and original members of the famed Complicité. In Marcel, which they co-created, they play an aging physical comedian and an inscrutable, clipboard-wielding nemesis mysteriously enjoined to test him with a battery of absurd tasks. Slapstick meets the limits of age and “all ages laugh and recognize their own absurdity in the comic antics.” – The Guardian


THE ART OF LAUGHTER - Created by and Featuring Jos Houben

"A comedy about comedy about what makes audiences laugh. Performing in English, Jos Houben dissects everyday life – a baby’s first steps, a man falling in a restaurant, the essence of various cheeses – revealing why laughter is at the core of our humanity. The Guardian calls it a show about “how a body can make people laugh.”
—

★★★★

“Marcello Magni and Jos Houben are two of contemporary theatre’s greatest clowns…

funny, heartbreaking.” – The Guardian review of MARCEL

★★★★

“Jos Houben is so pinpoint accurate with his body, you might imagine

laughter dying from dissection.” – The Guardian review of THE ART OF LAUGHTER

★★★★

“Poignant, Powerful…Recalls Chaplin, The Marx Brothers…Silent comedy that speaks volumes.” – The Evening Standard review of MARCEL

“An hour of inspired silliness endowed with a poignant core. Houben and Magni, wonderfully relaxed yet alive to the moment and the audience, keep us in a state of pleasurable suspense wondering what they’ll do next. Although there are neat sprinklings of verbal wit, the root of the laughs this highly skilled pair generate is slapstick. Clever yet elementally funny and marked by a knowing innocence about life and death, Marcel is resonant entertainment.” – The Times review of MARCEL

“A pianist practices day after day for the muscles that guide his fingers to become so flexible that we can begin to speak of the art of piano playing. Actors do exercises to develop their bodies but this has no meaning until they go beyond their muscles.
Both Jos Houben and Marcello Magni spent years in the rigorous schooling of Jacques Lecoq, and then the demands on each performer in the Théâtre de Complicité, to develop their thoughts, bodies, and feelings to the point where making theatre can truly become an art.
It is a work of high theatricality that the two – Marcello and Jos – create together as one performing body when they bring to us MARCEL. In THE ART OF LAUGHTER, Jos goes way beyond what he can explain in words, it is in every inch of his finely tuned instrument where a smile and answer take their real place, which leads us into the great unknown. This art is THE ART OF LAUGHTER. Marcello has similarly developed his craft through many living experiences.” – Peter Brook

“Jos Houben is Belgian. Marcello is from Bergamo. Like the great cuisines of their respective countries, they are utterly different, but exquisitely mouthwatering. Age old comic recipes combine in the hands of masters render the familiar un-recognisable, and the piquantly absurd, irresistible. Their bodies, tall and long, short and bald, contradict, interweave, commingle and coalesce producing a feast of absurd hilarity and irrational delirium. They are a rare and extraordinary delight.” – Simon McBurney