Ralph Oswick: Playing the fool in the fall

The trees in the park across the river from my apartment greet November with a very artistic layered offering.

Some leaves are gloriously golden, some are brown while others remain steadfastly fresh and green. It’s an effect worthy of one of those New England fall holiday posters.

With up to fourteen swans faffing about on the river in the foreground, it’s the perfect picture of autumn reverie.

That is until the guys with the leaf blowers get going. Why has nobody invented a silent leaf blower? It’s as if a whole gang of French teenagers are haring round the park on mopeds. Exit grey squirrel residents sharpish!

Years ago, the Natural Theatre Company, as a follow-up to Bath Arts workshop’s residency in an arts centre in Rotterdam (see their splendid new book for full details) produced a circus show with an autumnal theme.

Set in the Sunset Home for Retired Clowns, I asked the organisers if we could get some autumn leaves to scatter around.

Next day, a council parks department truck turned up with about a ton of leaves. It being Holland, the leaves were very clean, no sign of any doggie do.

There were enough leaves to fill our circus ring two feet deep! This profoundly changed the plot of the show in that the clowns could secrete themselves beneath the leaves before the audience entered and a wicked ringmaster could summon them up to do their party pieces before sending them back down into oblivion.

This simple device added myriad layers of meaning to what was originally intended to be a light-hearted diversion.

Much of the Natural’s street theatre contained a simple idea which was expanded upon in the minds of the audience.

For example, our faceless bowler hatted businessmen, known as The Normals as they simply carried out normal everyday tasks but without faces, were the subject of much conjecture.

Were they evil city planners, flour graders, or Chaplinesque mime artists? In the eyes of the police in the 1980s, bowler hats and masks meant IRA.

We never got arrested wearing our flowerpot masks, as alien Coneheads or even when dressed as police. But along came the Normals in their Lurex stocking masks and out came the riot shields and even the dogs on one occasion.

As I was thrown into a cell at Brighton nick, I intoned loftily that we got an Arts Council grant for doing this.

The burly officer who had my arm firmly wedged up my back replied ‘The Arts Council must be effing mad!’

Months later we won the court case, the police paid us compensation and the bowler hats, which had been confiscated as evidence and displayed on the ledge in front of the beak throughout our ‘trial,’ were returned.

In Bath, a constable told us to remove our masks immediately.

I explained sotto voce that it was against company policy to be seen disrobing in public.

So, he made us go into the foyer of a bank to take them off. Bank? Stocking masks?

Once again, I leave your imaginations to construct the consequences!