MARGINAL COMMENTS
By MONICA REDLICH . - FROM the arty chat that goes on in foyers among devotees of the ballet one might easily suppose that mime was a new discovery—a special, secret ritual known only to the genuine intellectual. But one has only to watch children dressing up, or a Frenchman, with complicated shrugs of the shoulders and no word spoken, explaining to his wife exactly why he is late, to realise that mine is no highbrow invention. It is language par excellence, and can be immeasurably more expressive than the spoken word.
There could be no better reminder of the greatness, the omnipotence of mime than to travel abroad, as I have recently, in a country where one cannot speak the language. We were bound, via Germany, for Austria, and for linguistic equipment had nothing but dim, unpractical memories of schoolbook German and a sixpenny phrase-book. The phrase-book, along the beaten conversational tracks, was absolutely invaluable. Please bring me . . . give me . . . tell me . . .
take this . . . call a taxi . . . we are hungry . . . thirsty . . . cold—all ordinary remarks could be managed somehow with its help, and We should even have been able, could we have found the places fast enough, to say as occasion required : How old are you ? You are very charming, I am fortunate to have met you, and I have a pain here.
But our first evening in Austria brought me forcibly up against the linntations of language, or at any rate of phrase-books. The crisis developed very suddenly. How was I to explain to a strange chambermaid, not merely that I wanted a bath, but that I had asked for it twenty minutes before, not from her but from one of her colleagues, and had been told that if I waited five minutes she would provide one : that I was growing somewhat impatient, but could not accept the bath which she was impetuously offering until she had ascertained that there was not one waiting for me elsewhere, or that the first chambermaid had not inadvertently drowned, herself while running the water in ?
The solution, of course, was mime : and never has any ballet-dancer, any actor or verse-speaker, mimed more vehemently than I did until I had got my meaning across.
When at last I stopped, every muscle aching, I was somewhat disturbed to see the chambermaid, in her turn, pillow her head on her hands, give a gentle snore, and go through all the motions of settling down for a good night's sleep. Even- tually, however, after vigorous miming by all parties, it was established with exquisite clarity that chambermaid number one had gone off duty (hence the sleep), but that chambermaid number two would be more than delighted to run me a bath which would be hotter, deeper, and in every way superior to that of which I had so unfortunately been cheated. We parted the best of friends, and said " Guten Tag" to each other about sixteen times a day as long as I remained at the hotel.
The moral is obvious. Mime conquers all, and the lack of a common language is the perfect basis for mutual understand- ing. Imagine a statesman dumbly expressing good will towards seven angry nations at once. Imagine a dictator miming his unwarlike intentions, or a Japanese airman expressing in gesture the intolerable provocation he had received from a crèche he had in self-defence been obliged to bomb. If Mr. Eden, M. Stalin, Herr Hitler, Signor Mussolini, and all the other European potentates, suddenly unable to speak any language but their own, met without interpreters and pooled their views on each other's actions and characters, the whole course of history would incontrovertibly be changed. There might be a little embarrassment, certainly, for mime is not only the Lowest Common Denominator of human conversation, but also the reductio ad absurdum. But let us have more and more miming, and less and less talk ; and one day somebody will laugh, not only at other people but also at himself, and then things really will begin to happen.
Previous page
