“Who in the twentieth century has been world famous as a soloist in mime?” Marcel Marceau asked the journalist Robert Butler in an interview with The Independent in 1995.
“Who?”
“I ask you the question. Who?”
“You?”
“Absolutely. It is the truth. You spoke the truth. What I did as a one-man show throughout the world, no one can do again in the twentieth century. Maybe in the twenty-first. I don’t know.”
Marceau seemed to dismiss the two hundred students who were currently enrolled in his school and the nine performers in his mime company. He taught them the grammar he used to carry out his illusions. They learned to reproduce his gestures faithfully. And when they succeeded in mirroring the master, they began to unravel the art.
“Marceau’s success has inspired imitators far and wide, few worth looking at. Mime’s gotten a bum rap. Watching Marcel Marceau has a marvelous restorative effect. He can say more with one eyebrow or one ripple of the fingers than would-be clones can do with their entire bodies,” Janice Berman wrote in Newsday in 1995.
Mime and Marceau have become interchangeable. Audiences have a hard time imagining the art form beyond his white face, barren stage, sailor suit, and above all, silence.
Remember, it was Deburau who turned Pierrot into a mute, at the insistence of French authorities. Napoléon barred speech from playhouses to protect France’s official state-run theaters, continuing the tradition of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI. Before Deburau’s pantomime blanche, Pedrolino’s chatty family improvised speech and acrobatics in the commedia. Greek and Roman mime performances were accompanied by song and narration from the chorus. Mime hasn’t been silent all that long.
In addition to wordless performances, Marceau and Deburau had one other thing in common. Both men died and appeared to take everything down with them. “The genius of Deburau had been replaced by a long succession of imitators who recreated the outward form, but had lost the inner fire; pantomime was an affair of the hands and face, the body covered by voluminous garments,” wrote Thomas Leabhart in 1998.
In 1945, when twenty-two-year-old Marcel Marceau sat down in the darkened cinema and watched Les Enfants du Paradis, did he foresee his own ascent?