Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter Aurélia, a performer since the age of three, is working her way back to the unself-conscious world of childhhood, she tells Lara Marlowe in Paris.
One of Aurélia Thierrée's fondest childhood memories is of being shut inside a suitcase. "It was fun," says the third-generation performing artist. Claustrophobic? "Never! I loved the smell of the cardboard. We had little windows to see out the side, and with my brother James, we would talk, window to window, before going on."
Aurélia and James's father, a circus clown named Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, carried the two trunks out to centre-stage and set them down. Suddenly, little legs sprouted from the cases. As the baffled Jean-Baptiste looked on, his suitcases scurried off into the wings.
Aurélia is 32 years old now, but she still contorts her arms and legs and squeezes into small spaces for the sake of entertainment. Those lucky enough to attend her show, Aurélia's Oratorio, in Galway next month will see a chest of drawers on stage. One drawer will open. A hand will stick out, then a foot, and eventually Aurélia's pretty blonde head.
"I'm always careful about describing too much of it," Thierrée says. "The show is so based on surprise. Even the chest of drawers . . . I love it when people don't know there's someone inside, and it suddenly opens. It's difficult to keep secret because they've used the photo for publicity. The first few times I did it, it was so fun, because people had no idea."
The show is the creation of Aurélia's mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, the daughter of the late Charlie Chaplin. Aurélia was five or six years old when Chaplin died, and she doesn't remember him.
With her floppy black hat, saucer-shaped blue eyes, petite size and hippie-style clothes, Thierrée looks like a waif from one of her grandfather's films. Being Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter is "a bit surreal", she says. "A wonderful, magical thing that is there, but that is not palpable."
Charlie and Oona Chaplin's eight children and their offspring "are such a big family, spread all over the world", Thierrée adds. Her maternal grandmother, Oona O'Neill, daughter of American playwright Eugene O'Neill, died a decade after Chaplin. "She was a wonderful, wise, beautiful lady," Thierrée recalls.
Victoria Chaplin met Jean-Baptiste Thierrée when he saw her photograph in a magazine and wrote to her.
"She wrote back," says Aurélia. "He offered to do this circus show, and she was really interested. It's pretty miraculous. They're still together and in love and working, 34 years later."
Many children dream of a childhood like Aurélia and James Thierrée's. "When we were growing up we didn't realise how original it was," she says. "It was just life, and we were travelling and every week was a different city. At night we knew we had to do these things on stage at a certain time and have fun with it.
"We worked with circuses at the beginning. We lived in a caravan for nine or 10 years, when we toured. When we'd go home to France, there was a house in the country. Eventually we upgraded to hotels, because we went from working in circus tents to working in theatres."
THIERRÉE WAS ABOUT three when she persuaded her parents to let her go on stage.
"As a child you are less self-conscious," she says, sipping a Diet Coke in a bar near the Gare de l'Est. "It's more of a weird atmosphere that embraces you into something. You become more self- conscious as you grow up, and all the work is to go back to that unconsciousness you had as a child."
Including their children in the show was "more a way for my parents to keep us together as a family, instead of leaving us with au pairs or families while they travelled", Thierrée says. "We were home-schooled. In every town we had a different professor come to the theatre. Sometimes they were fascinating people."
When she was 14, Thierrée rebelled. "I didn't want to travel any more. I wanted to go to school, to live in a house," she says.
By chance, the family were in Rome, so her parents put her in boarding school there for a few months, then in a day school in Paris. She spent years doing "different things", including waitressing, office work and helping homeless youths in Manhattan. "The more things you do, the more it feeds what you are going to bring to a part, what you offer," she says.
Thierrée's flat in the 10th arrondissement has been her base for years now, along with her parents' home in the Massif Central. She greets the bar staff and customers by their first names. After months on the road, her favourite thing to do in Paris is to stay at home.
The family remain close, because they work together. Two of brother James's shows premiered at the Galway Arts Festival. Her parents' Invisible Circus is still on the road. "All our work comes from the same source. Victoria directed mine completely. She helped James on his. The show with my father they built together," Thierrée says. "There's a style and an aesthetic that is common to the three. Everybody wants to have all three shows together in the same venue. I'll go with whatever we all decide together."
IN THE 18 months since it was completed, Aurélia's Oratorio has been to Munich, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Britain, Portugal and Norway. Later this year, Thierrée and her team of six will travel to Macao and South Africa. Because the show relies on visual images, not language, it travels well.
The title was found by Thierrée's father, Jean-Baptiste. "He liked the alliteration," she says. "It was the idea that every one of us has his own personal madness, like an internal music."
The show would not have happened without Victoria. "My mother built the universe, the little tableaux," Thierrée says. "She throws me in and I have to make sense of things and find the logic within that. That's how I contribute to her work."
Victoria Thierrée Chaplin was initially inspired by a book entitled The World Upside Down, describing an artistic movement during the Middle Ages.
"The drawings were always inverted," Thierrée explains. "For example, the man carried the horse, or the servant forced the king to obey. Victoria thought they would make good visuals, and so there are a lot of things in the show that are inverted logic."
The chest-of-drawers scene was the first one concocted by mother and daughter, during one summer in the country. Gradually, Victoria added more of the dreamlike sequences, using flower vases and hanging laundry, and an overcoat that tries to kill Timothy Harling, the Canadian dancer who is Aurélia's onstage partner. Towards the end, a model train drives through Aurélia's stomach, in a scene reminiscent of a Dalí or Magritte painting.
The Daily Telegraph called Aurélia's Oratorio "a seamless spectacle of transformations and visual puns". But the reliance on exotic contraptions, most of them devised by Victoria, can be a source of anxiety.
"It's very fragile. Every night I'm scared it's going to break," says Thierrée. "Every night there is something that has to be tamed, objects to be rebuilt. You cannot be totally sure and safe when you work with a lot of props."
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER continue to change the show constantly. "One of the ideas behind it was that a woman is going mad, and this is her madness," Thierrée explains. "And there was also the idea that when you dream, something totally ridiculous happens to you and you just adapt to it. You don't question it while you dream."
When the 70-minute show starts, says Thierrée, "my make-up is perfect, my hair is perfect. I end in such a mess! At the moment I start, I just throw myself into it. The rhythm gets faster and faster and faster until the end. I can't think until I'm at the other end. It's not exhausting; it's uplifting".
Though the show is, above all, entertainment, Thierrée feels it works best when audiences grasp its dark side.
"It's really on a thin line," she says. "It looks very light and pretty, but in fact, there is an undertone that is much more dramatic and desperate."
What does she want the audience to getout of it? She pauses for a moment, then says: "I love it when they keep on thinking about it afterwards."