KEY POINTS:
Steven Bishop, the Australian former dentist who plays the Clown - a haplessly oily exponent of good ol' Euro showbiz - in Cirque du Soleil's Varekai
After touring with the show in North America, accompanied by his wife and four kids, he's been playing to Australian audiences before Varekai opens in Auckland tomorrow night. A phone call caught him between rehearsals and that evening's showtime in hometown Brisbane.
So do your kids realise that's Dad's job isn't quite like that of other dads?
Sort of yes and no. Kids are very adaptable. I think the oldest one, who's 12, has experienced a normal school so he's got something to compare it with. But kids are just great - they just go with the flow and adapt to the situation. Certainly being back here, seeing their cousins, they feel a bit different. But I don't think they will know for a long time the impact of being part of this amazing group of Cirque kids.
How did you go from dentistry to this?
Even when I was studying dentistry I had an interest in mime and I was doing mime courses, theatre shows, the odd cabaret. After working for two years as a dentist in private practice I saved up enough money to go and study overseas. I studied and worked in Paris for 4 1/2 years and when I came back to Brisbane I had a balance of part-time dentistry and part-time performing, so I always had both things happening at the one time. It's not like I had a midlife crisis and thought: "I want to be a clown". It was always just ticking away there. The job with Cirque just meant I hung up my drill, so to speak.
Whatever job you did, you were always pursuing better smiles.
Yeah, I guess so. There are lots of similarities - with patients you are dealing with individuals and it's important to make a contact with them. Certainly that's the main aim of clowning, except it's not one on one, it's one on 2600. But it still begins with the individual eye-contact.
And as there is a skill with pulling teeth, there is a skill with pulling laughs.
Yeah, absolutely.
Though your character isn't a very clown kind of clown.
It's not really red-nose makeup-type clowning. It's really more about comedy and the comedy of timing. If you say the word "clowning" in Europe they understand what it is, but on this side of the world we've got it a bit pigeonholed towards a red nose and a funny wig. I've never studied that or been terribly interested in it. I'm interested in what makes people laugh and why.
And the character you play - he's in a different world to the rest of Varekai. It looks like he's sprung from a French variety show from 1957.
Yeah, exactly. The character I performed for many years before I came to Cirque was very much of the old vaudeville world and in his show he did everything from magic to escapology, mind-reading, a ventriloquist act - all the vaudevillian disciplines were tried. So it sort of filters down to this wannabe kind of character who is low on talent but high on desire.
It's like John Cleese - the more ridiculous he becomes, the more lost he is in his world, which just becomes more funny. It's interesting when you get a man up on stage in a suit. What are you doing in the middle of this magic act dressed in a suit being serious? It's the counterpoint to the show and it gives the audience that connection of: "What if a normal person was up there? What would happen?" By creating the laughs it makes the drama and everything a little more intense - it creates the full meal then, with a bit of sugar.
How has it been going back to Oz to perform?
The show is the thing that I've done that I'm the most proud of, so it's a great pleasure from that point of view to walk off stage and know you don't have to say, "What do you really think?" You know they are going to really enjoy it.
* Cirque du Soleil's Varekai, Auckland showgrounds Jan 5 to Feb 18. Tickets from Ticketek.
