WHEN you scrape the white stick and happy face off a clown, you may expect to find a sad little man underneath but this is not so with the fit looking Slava Polunin (47). For all the gentle poignant gormlessness of his on stage persona, the Russian clownmaster radiates vast self confidence. His intelligent blue eyes rake the wall as he talks, the vivacious, handsome face is framed by a daft frizz that fans out from around his balding crown.
Speaking through an interpreter, he passionately expounds the philosophies behind his show, the result of 20 years work in the area of tragic clowning. Here, his frustrations are echoed by shamelessly enormous effects, including huge cobwebs and vast bouncing balls. He is constantly shadowed by fellow clown, Brazilian Angela de Castr, representing perhaps the alter ego, the darker side - but there is another A option. Someone is always hanging over us, behind us, we always argue with this entity. We love it because it is part of us. At the same time we hate it, it wants something and we are afraid of that."
It's a big, simple, innocent show, but as he says, "Russian audiences cry at the end, because they feel it is connected with the history of my time and my people. If you take the final image" - a huge snow storm which engulfs the theatre in a blizzard of paper snow - "the storm has the power to destroy, at the same time it can bring something new. If you take the protagonist in, Snowskow, he suffers because everything he has collected has gone, been destroyed. At the same time he is flying with the storm which leads him to a new beginning."
Snowshow was created a year ago, and was snatched up by festivals in 12 countries. Born near Oral, Russia in 1950, he set up his theatre company, Litsedei, which developed from street theatre - to performances before audiences of tens of thousands. He's had his own television programme for 16 years, and headed an enormous drama school which has spawned a generation of clowning troupes.
A few years ago, he parted from Litsedei, where he was far more a director than an actor, and went to work on his own, directing the first carnival in St Petersburg since 1917. After that, he rented a little house in the huge spark in Pushkin, once the summer residence of the Tsar, where he developed the idea for Snowshow from dream notebooks.
His pre eminence in Russia throughout some of the darker years of communism suggests he has some political skills of his own.
"I use clowning as camouflage, because in Russia at the end of the 1970s, people weren't ready to accept a lot of ideas. The state wanted to have stable companies, with no changes: operas, Swan Lake, and so on. So I found the artform which allows you to be crazy; it was a research laboratory, and young people from all over Russia came to me."
It has also informed his peculiarly suggestive poetic brand of clowning theatre: "If you take any image I use, it has any number of meanings; this is my aesthetic. It could reach a child, who could smile and laugh at the actors, or it can reach the philosopher, who would understand that the interpretations are endless."
