Fish bowl is a laugh-out-loud silent comedy that makes its London premiere this January.
Once upon a time today, in three small attic apartments in Paris, a big man, a tall thin man and a curvaceous blonde are neighbours. This would be a romantic story if it wasn’t for the fact that these three odd-balls have a special talent for messing things up. Messing everything up. With one disaster leading to another amidst a deluge of jokes, this quirky trio cling to anything that looks like love, life or hope.
Winner of the Molière Award for Best Comedy (2017) and coming to Sadler’s Wells as part of MimeLondon, this is a Grand-Guignolesque performance; objects fly around, characters fall flat on their faces and the whole stage is in total disarray from the various fires, leaks, storms and other whacky unexpected accidents that culminate in a dizzying chaos. Endearing, laugh-inducing and irresistible, our three anti-heroes shock us just as much as they make us cry… with laughter.
We sat down to chat with creator and director Pierre Guillois to learn more about the piece.
What first inspired Fishbowl, and how did the image of fragile, shared living spaces shape the work from its earliest stages?
I lived for nearly ten years in what is known in Paris as a chambre de bonne, a 9m² room, around 96 square feet, with very basic amenities: a sink in the room and a toilet on the landing. Those were happy years, even if today I am very glad to live in a larger flat. What interested me most was describing the loneliness you can experience when living in such small spaces, tucked away under the eaves.
Theatrically, small spaces are fascinating because on stage we usually work with spaces that are much larger than reality. Apartments in the theatre are often far bigger than real ones. Accepting the constraint of extremely small living spaces was therefore bound to produce a very particular and original kind of theatre. From the very beginning of rehearsals, we built a temporary set so that we could work immediately within these constraints.
As a creator working without text, how do you build emotional precision and narrative clarity purely through physical action and rhythm?
It was the first time we had created a work without text, so we had to learn two things: how to make the situations understandable, and how to convey emotion.
As a creator working without text, how do you build emotional precision and narrative clarity purely through physical action and rhythm?
It was the first time we had created a work without text, so we had to learn two things: how to make the situations understandable, and how to convey emotion.
To do this, we filmed everything, both rehearsals and performances. We carefully analysed these videos to see whether our gestures, our looks and above all the rhythm, pauses, suspensions and breaks, made the situations perfectly clear. We had to discipline our bodies so that no unnecessary gesture would disturb the meaning of the action the audience needed to understand.
For the emotions, we did the same work we usually do with text. We thought deeply about the characters and invented a past for them, their traumas and obsessions. These are stories the audience will never know, but they nourished us and justified the intensity of our emotions at every moment.
At first, for example, I was making too many facial expressions and was tempted to over explain my inner feelings. Gradually, we learned that we needed to place ourselves in very intense, almost paroxysmal emotional states, because the characters experience both bitter failures and great hopes, and to trust these states. The human eye, and therefore the audience’s eye, is very sharp and perceives everything, especially when it comes to emotion.
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| Photo by Fabienne Rappeneau |
How did influences from Chaplin, Keaton and Tati inform the piece without allowing homage to slip into imitation?
That is indeed the risk. The idea was never to create a pastiche of silent cinema. Comic book characters and Mr Bean influenced us just as much as the great figures of cinema. That said, we did study certain scenes by Laurel and Hardy very carefully, particularly to learn from their mastery of rhythm, in order to develop the mechanics of laughter we were looking for.
Above all, we had a very clear objective. We wanted to create a play with the distinctive feature that the characters only appear when they are not speaking. At the same time, we wanted to tell a contemporary story about people who live alone in small spaces in big cities, a reality that is becoming more and more common.
In Fishbowl, comedy and loneliness coexist closely. How did you calibrate that balance during rehearsal and performance?
It happened quite naturally, because this balance was present from the very beginning of the project. The desire was to create a piece that was both comical and melodramatic. I am convinced that the more deeply you explore the drama within comic situations, the more powerful the laughter becomes.
Chaplin is the absolute master of this. He makes us laugh at the hunger that gnaws at his tramp, or at his fear of dying when he clumsily slips a grenade into his sleeve. When gags are justified by the real dramas experienced by the characters, it becomes quite simple, at certain moments, to strip these figures bare once the gag has passed and to leave space for their humanity.
What has international touring taught you about how physical comedy communicates across cultural and social contexts?
We have seen that the show, its mechanics of laughter and emotion, works in all the countries we have visited. There is very little difference in how it is received from one place to another.
In Fishbowl, comedy and loneliness coexist closely. How did you calibrate that balance during rehearsal and performance?
It happened quite naturally, because this balance was present from the very beginning of the project. The desire was to create a piece that was both comical and melodramatic. I am convinced that the more deeply you explore the drama within comic situations, the more powerful the laughter becomes.
Chaplin is the absolute master of this. He makes us laugh at the hunger that gnaws at his tramp, or at his fear of dying when he clumsily slips a grenade into his sleeve. When gags are justified by the real dramas experienced by the characters, it becomes quite simple, at certain moments, to strip these figures bare once the gag has passed and to leave space for their humanity.
What has international touring taught you about how physical comedy communicates across cultural and social contexts?
We have seen that the show, its mechanics of laughter and emotion, works in all the countries we have visited. There is very little difference in how it is received from one place to another.
This is thanks to body language, but also to the theme of human loneliness in big cities, and to the fact that the characters are ordinary people, what we call little people in French, with whom a very wide audience can identify regardless of their country of origin.
As Fishbowl makes its West End debut, what do you most hope audiences recognize beneath the spectacle and laughter?
The originality of our approach. I hope London audiences will be charmed by the unlikely mix of styles that defines the show. That they will be shaken with laughter by the frenzied mechanics we set in motion, supported by an invisible technical armada, and that at the same time they will be moved, even unsettled, by the characters’ journeys.
As Fishbowl makes its West End debut, what do you most hope audiences recognize beneath the spectacle and laughter?
The originality of our approach. I hope London audiences will be charmed by the unlikely mix of styles that defines the show. That they will be shaken with laughter by the frenzied mechanics we set in motion, supported by an invisible technical armada, and that at the same time they will be moved, even unsettled, by the characters’ journeys.
I hope they will be able to move, without even noticing it, from the most trivial moments to poetic suspensions.
Fish bowl runs at The Peacock Theatre in London from Wednesday 28th until Saturday 31st January 2026. Tickets are available from https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/le-fils-du-grand-resaeu-fishbowl/
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| Photo by Fabienne Rappeneau |
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