WITH SLÄPSTICK YOU WON’T KNOW WHAT HAS HIT YOU: THEIR NEWEST SHOW HAS UNPARALLELED LEVELS OF AMUSEMENT!

The five performers refer to rich traditions whilst being unbelievably innovative.

A shaky elderly gentleman peskily blocks the parterre entrance with his walking frame. Later, we see him again in a masterful Buster Keaton-esque act as a senile singer. In the meantime, a musician on stage shoots a swan out of the air, that goes on to play its own role in a fantastical variant of the Swan Lake ballet. Even then, we’re only just getting started. These five musical clowns fit enough material for two first-rate shows into one production.

Slapstick, music hall and silent film are genres that don’t immediately appeal to everyone. There is no other explanation for why this group of artists is consistently ignored by television stations. Släpstick’s love for the music hall tradition positively drips from them, with references to Chaplin, fairground romanticism, and the German depression-era a capella group Comedian Harmonists. But at the same time, their shows are delightfully modern, innovative and humorous.

Together with Percossa and the Ashton Brothers, and boosted by director Karel de Rooij (the ‘mini’ of Mini & Maxi) the group displays the best evidence that the disappearance of this genre would be a great impoverishment for the theatre world. The newest production of Släpstick has unprecedentedly high levels of amusement.

You literally won’t believe your eyes: the drummer and his instruments are physically slung around the stage, five musicians plays the same double bass at once, the slide of the trombone turns out to be both a flute and a violin bow, and even the clarinet mouthpiece is a fully functioning instrument in the hands of Släpstick. A phenomenal production.