Theatre review: Buffoon teeters between slapstick and tragedy in an unabashedly offbeat portrait
Wildly physical humour meets fanciful storytelling in a one-man play that pushes its performer to extremes
Kayvon Khoshkam plays a man alone with his demons in Buffoon. Photo by Sara McNeil
There is a moment in the one-man show Buffoon where its title character Felix depicts the decline of his father, a musclebound trapeze artist who deflates like a human balloon into an invalid. He makes the sound of air fizzing out, outstretched biceps shrivelling, and spine folding in on itself.
It perfectly encapsulates the unabashedly weird and stylized mix of slapstick and tragedy in Vancouver writer Anosh Irani’s Buffoon, directed here by Lois Anderson.
The same strange balance can be found in Felix, played on this afternoon by Kayvon Khoshkam: he compensates for his torments by becoming a clown. When we first meet him, he sits grimly in the cold fluorescent glow of a jail cell, wearing prison-issue coveralls. His eyes glare intensely out from the white face paint smeared across his face. “It’s chalk. Rudimentary. Like me,” he grunts. (Khoshkam juggles multiple parts in the play, and alternates the role with Andrew McNee.)
Photo by Sara McNeil
Soon Felix opens up to tell his meandering life story, starting with one of the show’s grotesquely over-the-top physical highlights: his birth in front of an audience, to Russian trapeze artist The Flying Olga. From there, Buffoon becomes about his search for love. And it’s clear from an early age that he’s not going to get it from the glamorous Olga: “I’m nobody’s mama,” she hisses at him as she sucks hard on a cigarette.
We watch Felix become increasingly jaded, finding some respite in the books, poetry, dope, and booze of his stand-in parent, the ticket-taker Smile, and in his shy love interest Aja. But as he reminds us, he’s a buffoon, and his demons sometimes get the better of him.
Khoshkam’s performance is a physical endurance test that pushes him to extremes; exaggerated physical jokes can flip instantly to pathos, all while he shifts between Russian, Scottish, and British accents. Some of his best characterizations come from the gentle Smile and the haughty Olga; Aja feels less developed in the script. As for Felix, Khoshkam brings a perfect, serrated edge to his vulnerability; wait till you hear his character’s pronouncements on hating children and picnics. But he could dial back the performance, with more nuance, less rush. Even three-ring circus clowns can make the most impact with quieter, detailed gestures.
Irani’s storytelling is a mix of fanciful wordplay (the buffoon is the “antithesis, nemesis, of the acrobat”) punctuated by poetic insights (“The trapeze is about two things: trust and love. When we hold hands, it means everything.”) Still, he draws too heavily on circus clichés, and the dark ending feels abrupt after the elaborations that have led up to it.
Elsewhere, Amir Ofek’s set strikes a near perfect, surreal frame for all this; part origami shoebox, part collapsing circus tent, it’s a claustrophobic, perspective-skewing cell. With Itai Erdal’s magical lighting, it morphs magically between different times and places—from a circus ring to a starry, moonlit night.
The design, not to mention the mood here, is a mashup of absurdity, existentialism, and isolation that does speak to these strange times. And how much you enjoy it may have a lot to do with how close the buffoonery hits to home right now.
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