2 hours ago
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Many speak of a teacher in their childhood who changed them, someone who reveals knowledge about the world they carry with them for the rest of their lives. I didn’t have one of those. It wasn’t until I was 24 and living in Paris, where I stumbled into Philippe’s class almost by accident, that this happened. Provocative, demanding, deliberately inappropriate and utterly hilarious, Philippe taught me not to carry anything. No baggage, no ideas; knowing nothing is all you need. Because we are all ridiculous.
His mother was Spanish, and we would eat her meals with relish when she came to cook for him, or rather with him, in his appartement lined with his writings, many of which had “rêves” inscribed on the spine. He would refer to his father as “ce salaud bourgeois” (that bourgeois arsehole) and he delighted in telling me the story of being thrown out of school aged eight because he punched the gymnastics teacher who was trying to instil discipline into young boys by turning them into military martinets.
Of the professions and attitudes that merited his ire – the military, the church, hypocrisy, sham, inauthenticity, politicians, academics and fascists – “collaborateurs” had a special place in his heart. For a boy who grew up in postwar France, this slur was reserved for the most deserving. “C’est un collabo de merde de chien” – a dog-shit collaborator, though that translation does nothing for the pleasurable disgust and gastronomic relish with which he spat these words out from under his moustache.
The moustache, a tangled mass of straggling unruly black wire obscuring the entire region between his nose and his lower lip, was immediately fascinating to me at my first meeting, on a cold November evening in 1980 at his studio in Rue Alfred de Vigny. That, and his pipe clenched tight between his teeth. Then the wild hair, a bright green sagging sweater, ageing boots and eyes (framed by round glasses) that missed nothing, took nothing seriously and ferociously studied every possibility of the hilarious or the pretentious.
The room was full of people who didn’t know what to expect but who had heard there was something Philippe Gaulier was offering you couldn’t get anywhere else.
I shook his hand.
Pause.
Look.
“Bonsoir.”
“Bonsoir.”
Pause.
Look.
“You arre eeengleesh?”
“Yes … er … Oui.”
“Tout le monde a des problèmes.”
What did he just say? Everyone has problems? Hand still held. Eyes sparkling.
Wicked laughter.
First lesson.
“Moi,” placing his hand on his belly, “moi, je suis le professeur, vous … vous êtes des élèves.”
Rules were established. Rules of the game. The game from the outset was that he was the teacher, you were the pupils. The gymnastics teacher was parodied, the relationship of power was offered as a structure to be undermined and shattered with laughter.
There was no style, no set ideas, each person was scrupulously attended to, taken apart, built up again, invited, insulted, cajoled, delighted and, most importantly, played with. He would play with each of us with infinite generosity, stomach-aching hilarity, indefatigable persistence and utterly spontaneous flexibility.
We learned to fail, and start again; we learned to jettison our own ideas, because ideas were never the problem, only performing them. When people laugh at you, it reveals a truth, which is why we hate being laughed at in real life. But with Philippe we could learn that failing to embrace this vulnerable sense of exposure was inimical to revealing our humanity.
Sharing this fallibility in a complicitous relationship with the audience is a radical act; an anarchic joining to be found in no other art form.
“If an actor has forgotten what it is like to play as a child, they should not be an actor,” he would say to me as he took me to the bar in the lunch break before the afternoon session. At that point he had decided I was his assistant and we needed to discuss the serious business of the afternoon session.
“Tiens, mon petit, on va chercher de l’inspiration.”
Then, leaning across the bar, pipe in mouth …
“Deux grands martini gins …”
