Run!
Kate Newby >

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From his narrow mandarin collar, a trapeze tunic drapes, reaching almost to his knees. It looks as though a sheet had been draped over Pierrot’s entire body, and a hole cut neat and close around his neck. The fabric is sheet-like: fine, lightweight, white. Silk, it seems, by the way it falls around his limbs. The shirt is expansive, oversized. It is difficult to tell where the sleeves meet the trunk, where Pierrot’s arms find the rest of his body. When he is at ease, the garment surrounds him. When his arms extend above height as his shoulders, the structure finally becomes visible, and yet still it is not stretched taut. The sleeves end in wide, looping swathes, and are longer than Pierrot’s arms. His hands fight to escape.
Parading down the front of the boxy shirt-coat, three comically oversized pompoms - each the size of Pierrot’s hand - pretend to be buttons. A large square of fabric on each side of the front of the shirt become pockets, each adorned with a pair of pompoms whose weight causes the mouth of the pocket to droop, gaping open.

Starting somewhere beneath that great ocean of a shirt, his trousers are long and wide, brushing the stage with the same precisely measured hang as the curtains which frame Pierrot’s on-stage world. Always swaying with the movement of his hips and knees, they appear to float. They appear to carry him across the boards. His soft white shoes have a small heel and a squared-off toe and are adorned with polite bows. Hidden beneath pant-legs that are far wider than his feet, the shoes are barely ever seen. It is the shirt, that compelling, voluminous mass, which always holds the attention.

In moments of vulnerability, the shirt engulfs him. Too large, he looks meek inside it. Fallen to the stage, Pierrot wilts beneath the flaccid cloak, entangled and suffocated. But in an instant he changes his mind - in the next moment, the shirt is armour: brave, he is massive, threatening. His exaggerated actions pull the shirt into shape, revealing corners and edges. The costume is as angular as Pierrot’s resolve. The pompoms, as if they were his thoughts themselves, give a weight to each movement. They push and pull the shirt in accordance with Pierrot’s gesture; they make the tide of silk ebb and flow. The wide sleeves become wing-like when Pierrot reaches out. The widths of the sleeves pull like sails, catching gusts of air stirred by even the smallest of gestures. At once a nightgown, an overcoat, a smock, cloak or cape – the shirt changes character as quickly as Pierrot’s fortune. As soon as he sees it or thinks it, he becomes it: an aristocrat or a beggar, a doctor or a lunatic. In fact, Pierrot is always both at once: his costume has the power to deny any fantasy that plays across his mask.

Whiter than his whiteface make-up, Pierrot’s costume performs a similar task: it is the blank surface from which expression emerges. It is a tabula rasa, which adapts to any number of contexts and can hold any kind of ‘content’. Even those who choose not to follow the plot exactly read the grace of his movements, and the way the costume describes them. The costume is that which amplifies, clarifies every gesture. It translates thoughts into signs, if only fleetingly. His gestures make up a language both heavily studied and intuitive.

Pierrot’s costume fits him so well, not because it was made for him: rather, he was made for, inside, around it. His movements are toward the costume, live within it, and perform with a deep physical knowledge of it. A tool whose use has become second nature, Pierrot’s garb is worn with a groundedness, a lived-in quality which defies the contrived nature of the nomenclature, ‘costume’ and ‘acting’. Whilst the mime is, of course, an actor, his specific task is to describe reality with as sparse a mimesis as possible. His costume, indistinguishable from his character, is not merely a performance prop, but the frame within which he performs. Pierrot’s costume is the medium by which we begin to hear his words; it provides a different kind of volume.