STAGE REVIEW : Marcel Marceau Remakes World in His Own Image

Mime maestro Marcel Marceau, who performed his one-man show at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa Monday night, is the quintessential modern European man in isolation, conjuring up his own world out of the ashes of the old one. His art is born of pain and great self-discipline (only the most rigorous performer could do what he does at age 63). His work looks at death as much as it looks at life.

In other words, he is much more than Red Skelton’s former TV partner, which is probably how most Americans approach Marceau these days. The very upscale Segerstrom audience, even if their memory of him did not transcend TV, watched as a theater audience. Some of the pain, as well as the joy he transmitted, was received.

The silence of a Marceau performance has a way of telescoping one’s attention down to the essentials. “The Cage,” a piece that has him trapped in an imploding cell, is all the more terrifying with the wave of silence that engulfs it. It is one of his “style pantomimes,” the form he has developed over the years since training with the great mime artists Etienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault. Unlike his work as Bip, his universal Everyman whom we are treated to in the evening’s second half, his style miming often tries to soar above the earthly plain.

These are ambitious works--”The Creation of the World,” “The Angel,” “The Public Garden.” The first is his laconic view of Adam and Eve, while the second, Dante-esque in scope, follows a man in his encounters with the flesh and the spirit. They could be Bip’s fantastic dreams; even the romance of “The Public Garden” is the daydream of a lonely soul.

What Marceau has mastered, above all, is the comedy of predicament, the comedy of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Bip is the star here: His dating service sends over too many women at once, his suicide attempts are foiled by hazard and too many badly tied rope knots, and the lion he’s trying to tame is every bit the individual show-off he is. But Bip’s witheringly funny life-threatening situations also apply to a warrior in a style mime, “The Samurai’s Sword.” When he wants to sheath the sword, it won’t go in; when he taunts an enemy and tries to pull the weapon out, it won’t budge.

He is the macho man disarmed. The program consists mainly of standards, like Bip playing David and Goliath (the evening’s crowning crowd-pleaser, as Marceau shifts from giant to little guy in a split second) or Bip going to war. Basic training is bad enough (this section is pure Chaplin); but life in the trenches becomes a meeting with death.

His soldier’s story is literally that, with plot turns and an unexpected denouement (Marceau is ultimately life-affirming). It is amazing enough that Marceau appears not to have lost any agility, suppleness or strength over the years. But the fusion of a dancer’s body with narrative sensibilities continues to make a Marceau performance one man’s act of remaking the world in his own image.

The stylish, Renaissance-garbed assistants, presenting title cards before scenes with supreme savoir faire , were Bogdan Novak and K. Scott Malcolm.