Marcel Marceau at The Civic

By FRANCIS TILL

THE CIVIC, Auckland - The gift Marcel Marceau brings to audiences today is not only a taste of the kinaesthetic magic that has transported millions into a realm where voiceless imagination rules over invisible matter, but a living connection to almost six decades of theatrical history.

Because of that, there is a gently poignant symmetry in a performance flanked by the Civic's Abyssinian panthers. The Civic was built in 1929 and has been resurrected to astonishing perfection. Marcel Marceau was born in 1923 and there is no possibility of restoration.

His power is waning. There is less athleticism - here and there, less elasticity. It has been, after all, 40 years since he won world renown through Max Liebman's Show of Shows, and 55 years since he transformed Decroux's formal physical grammar into a poetry of gesture that has spawned countless imitators of an inimitable original.

But watching Marceau is no simple exercise in nostalgia. His opening night audience here did not waver from fully rapt attention as he peopled the platform with a feckless tamer of lions, a dog walking its hapless master, a maker of masks destroyed by his own designs, and an astonishingly fresh Bip the Clown.

It is a mark of his power that the audience erupted into applause in the middle of several pieces and gave him endless calls at final curtain.

There is still genius in those hands and the famously painted face is more expressive than ever. His comic sense remains impeccable - Marceau could draw a laugh from a stone.

And so we see him here, now, in passing. When he is gone, there will be no one to take his place - there is no great understudy waiting to leap onto the stage. He has outlived most of that, and overshadowed the rest.

Still, if the elegant, striking theatre of his assistants - Gyongyi Biro and Alexander David Neander - is any indication, there is a great new age of mime being born under his tutelage. It will not resemble the work of the master in most respects, but then, as Marceau has often said, "There is only one Marceau".