Review: Slapstick’s Silent Comedy Gala 2016

At the start of this twelfth annual gala event for Bristol’s infectiously joyous celebration of silent film, festival director Chris Daniels strokes our egos by pointing out that nothing similar happens on anything like the same scale in any other city.

Famous and semi-famous silent film-lovers must be queuing up to appear these days, and entrusting host duties to comedian and broadcaster Robin Ince proves a wise choice; he’s genial and interesting on the subject, making a persuasive case in defence of Chaplin’s sentimentality as a kind of well-earned, deeply-felt pathos rather than cheap emotional manipulation.

Three brilliant and semi-improvisational musicians known as the European Silent Screen Virtuosi noisily accompany the first two ‘silent’ shorts, starting with Buster Keaton’s Cops! from 1922. Its curiously dark ending – the ever-impassive Keaton is rejected by his lady love and throws himself into a mob of marauding policeman – prompts Ince to hold up the filmmaker up as a very early existentialist.

Dusted down and buffed up for the event, the lesser-known Mighty as a Moose (1926) is a total riot, all the better for being seen with a huge, giggling crowd. Its daft plot, in which a husband (Charley Chase) and wife fail to recognise one another after they each have minor facial surgery, then start an illicit affair, is held together by a tight, pacey structure to rival many a modern sitcom episode.

Pre- and post-interval, we get a visit from Bernie Clifton, one-time performer on the BBC children’s show Crackerjack, who asks “How many of you thought I was dead?” without, perhaps, considering the more troublesome question of how many younger audience members were ever aware he was alive. His comedy song seems to work only for the more nostalgic members of the audience, but an unexpectedly sincere rendition of Nat King Cole’s Smile (“though your heart is breaking…”), is a perfectly apt introduction to the main event.

Chaplin’s The Kid is a delight of course, a pudding-like mix of pratfall comedy, Dickensian melodrama and even some unexpected, whimsical fantasy. It’s actually a bit uneven and structurally odd, but it’s as thrilling and surprising as ever to see just how much they got right.

Chief amongst its pleasures are as storming a performance from a six-year-old as has ever been committed to film, with Jackie Coogan laughing, crying, running, cooking and scamming his way through a consummate 30 minutes or so of screen time in which Chaplin allows – and probably encourages – him to steal every scene.

The 15-piece Bristol Ensemble play an only-slightly reduced version of Chaplin’s original score, and even with that many people playing directly beneath the screen, one mostly forgets they are there – which is either a waste of a superb performance, or more likely the highest compliment one could pay to performers of a live score. Finishing the night is an unplanned drop-in visit from Stephen Merchant, who appears elsewhere at the festival, and of course a huge round of applause for Chaplin himself. It is indeed hard to imagine this event happening anywhere other than Bristol: and at the venerable age of twelve, it shows no signs of going quiet.

Slapstick’s Silent Comedy Gala 2016 Friday, January 22, Colston Hall. For more Slapstick 2016 dates, visit www.slapstick.org.uk/2016-slapstick-festival