"amazing smile, absolute unit of a man, 100% recommend, only accepts pay in pancakes."

"The evening went off brilliantly and that was thanks to Ilan. He was totally successful in engaging and charming both children and adults alike, all who have been raving about him ever since."

"Serendipity is what you’re aiming for in Edinburgh: a happy discovery out of the blue. Yes, it sounds like a paradox, like “expect the unexpected”. But up here, you must not just expect it, but welcome it. So if you hear, for instance (in a genu-ine example from a few years ago), of a 15-minute musical about a stewardess called The Jolly Folly Of Polly The Scottish Trolley Dolly playing in a minor venue towards the bottom of the Royal Mile, well, it’s not much time or money, so you’ve nothing to lose by taking a punt on it. And if you’re staggering across the Royal Mile in the small hours and meet a crowd of drunken loud¬mouths, wait for a couple of minutes before writing them off: it could be comedian Arthur Smith’s legendary Alternative Walking Tour. This event, though, is now in semi-retirement following an incident in 2000 when the reeling mob was mistaken for a bunch of nocturnal anti-Ann Widdecombe protesters (no, honestly), which led to the arrest of comic Simon Munnery for assaulting a police offi¬cer . . . “assaulting” in the sense of getting in the way of the cop’s body- charge. (Munnery’s tried and acquittal were amusing, too, but took place outside Festival season.) The true Edinburgh expe-rience is being knocked side-ways by a show, trying to explain it to others and real-ising that there’s no way you can do so and still sound remotely compos mentis, such as the piece about 10 years ago which consisted of a Hungarian woman in a sealed Perspex tank, per¬forming a dance routine whose duration and moves were limited by the available air in the box. If I were to say that last week I was affected beyond words by a Polish theatre company singing the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh in the strange polyphonic harmonies of southern Albania, you’d no doubt wonder whether I’ve been getting enough sleep lately. Yet Chronicles: A Lamenta-tion by the Piesn Kozla com-pany is a remarkable piece admirable and impressive, though hardly shattering. And then, walking away from the venue a few min¬utes after it was over, I had to stop in my tracks: I was fighting back tears, for no reason I could identify. Somehow the piece had bypassed the conscious areas of my mind and tapped into the well of basic emotion. Harrowing stuff. But the main discovery of the month so far is altogether more joy-ous: a bunch of Ukrainian paper-tearing clowns: Around 1990, Italian “ori¬gami impressionist” Ennio Marchetto was the hit of the Fringe, performing a series of mime impersonations while wearing amazingly intricate costumes he had constructed out of card¬board. Marchetto returns this weekend for the first time in several years, but he may find his thunder already stolen by the Mim-I- Richi company and their show Paper World. Not that their show is as painstakingly designed . . . dean me, no. They sim¬ply tear loads of plain paper up and play with it. And I mean loads: possibly around an acre of the stuff per show. You walk into the theatre, see a huge paper backdrop and think, “Ah, that’ll be the climax of the show.” Not a bit of it: it’s already in shreds after half an hour, and the fun keeps coming. Mim-I-Richi’s discovery is a simple one: tear paper, crumple it up, and you can pretend it’s just about any-thing: a football, a baby, a maneating monster, what¬ever. It’s the same sort of aesthetic which has informed many of designer Julian Crouch’s projects in the UK with Improbable Theatre, but more endear¬ingly ramshackle. Also like Improbable, Mim-I-Richi relishes the spontaneous and unexpected; it’s that shared delight in the moment which is at the heart of the best clowning. The players go to great lengths to involve the audience in their show, and are happy to take ideas and run with them, even when the “idea” is an uncontroRa- ble little boy in the front row who won’t stop flinging balls of paper back at them. For this isn’t enforced audience participation of the “let’s pretend we’re having fun” kind. The four perform-ers manage to get hundreds of people in the Pod Deco’s main space all pratting about gleefully like kids in a playground; they create an atmosphere of free play that is intensely liberating, and make sure that every single person in the house is car¬ried along. All that without a single word of dialogue. People by the hundred are discovering Mim-I-Richi up here, but that doesn’t make the joy of serendipity any less when you find them yourself."

"The first time I saw Mimirichi, last year at the Edinburgh Fringe, I knew I would have to put them at the core of my fiendish and cunning plan for world domination. Mimirichi would leave everyone weak with laughter and begging me for more of the fun, and, of course, I would be a benign autocrat, sending Mimirichi out on a world-wide mission to sponsor their own brand of warm fuzziness and community spirit. In this cold, competitive world Mimirichi liberates hearts and minds and promotes participation and collaboration. The awful thing is that they are only at the Riverside Studios for TWO nights (until 1st July)! Please, please, rush down to Hammersmith and secure tickets for yourself, all your family (especially menopausal aunts and grumpy old men), your evil-minded neighbours, your traffic wardens and rouge traders, your bank manager and your boss. The four-man creative team at the heart of the mad, mad world of Mimirichi are superb physical performers who start off with some simple slapstick and build to a breathtaking break-dancing finale. But their secret lies in their generosity and the way they engage us with their world. This is a place where the imagination can transform paper into anything we want it to be and half of the fun is the delight in collaborating with them to make these transformations happen. It is a clown theatre for young and old alike, because it's full of the familiar and everyday. Mimirichi's Paper World is peopled with recognizable characters. There's the little guy with the broom overwhelmed by litter bugs on the rampage. And perhaps it's the same voracious paper-munching clown evolving into a despot who gets himself crowned with pomp and circumstance, and, to push the point home, also devours handbags and jackets from among the audience. I guarantee that by the end of the 85-minute show you will be shouting, screaming, pelting each other with paper, passing great swathes of the stuff back and forth and even eager to step onto the stage and be transformed into a goal-keeper for a paper football penalty or a beauty queen. At the core of this age-old humour there is an odd but recognizable logic at work, an absurd logic, or even illogical logic, perhaps, but once we accept the rules it all makes perfect sense (something like when Charlie Chaplin's starving tramp cooks his boots and eats them with perfect table manners and social etiquette). Mimirichi's gags are reminiscent of these extended comic scenarios from the Commedia lazzi and the silent movies. For example, a man desperate to find a public urinal is given increasingly complicated directions by a street cleaner in which each round of mimed instructions seems to take the longed for relief further away on a journey that includes swimming and punting across a river. Mimirichi put us in touch with a part of ourselves we don't pay much attention to these days. They belong to a long tradition of European clowning that includes the great zannis of Commedia dell'Arte, Chaplin and Keaton, Max Wall, Mayall and Edmondson and so on. This is an eternal and universal form of clowning, the carnivalesque, the Lords of Misrule, rather than the sanitized comic turns fed to children in 20th century circuses. In days gone by, this type of carnival event was considered dangerous by princes and municipalities, so that the travelling performers where often borderline outlaws. Happily, Mimirichi are completely legit, but they still can show us a few things that authoritarian rulers feared: that what usually passes for logic is suspect, and that a creative and imaginative response can present alternative solutions to traditions we take for granted. Perhaps, we should send them to the G8 Summit. If you cannot make it down to the Riverside Studios tonight go instead to a tattooist and have MIMIRICHI inscribed on your forehead, so that you will recognize their name should they come to a venue close to you at a future date."

"MimiRichi-Paper World in Beijing will be held at Beijing Youth Theatre. Before their appearance on the world scene, the MimiRichi toured the territory of the Soviet Union. Victories and prizes gained at different festivals and competitions have brought a huge popularity to actors. They were granted the status of professional Theatre in the 1989. In 1991 they were included into the World Clown Association in Bognor Regis (Great Britain).The professionalism of the Theatre has been confirmed by the Gold Prize obtaining at the 1-st International Contest of Actors of a Variety show in Stuttgart. This event influenced the direction of their creative work. Later there were other countries and the competitions, new awards and the achievements, memorable meetings and joint performances with “Mini-Max”, Dimitri, Olli, Hardy Hatter, Jango Edwards, “Kolombaoni”, Polunin, “Licedei” and many other stars of the present. The MimiRichi name means a rich mimicry and plastic, they help actors not only to attract attention but also to be various in their shows in any country of the world, irrespective of an age category. The MimiRichi theatre of a plastic comedy has already obtained world recognition, touring and continuing to give concerts in the Europe, South America, Japan, Germany and other countries. A white sheet of paper is always considered a symbol of endless creative abilities, which gives an incredible freedom to the imagination. Many works of art begin with a clean sheet of paper. Mimirichi theatre proves that a sheet of paper conceals no fewer opportunities for the theatre. In their production Paper World it is transformed into a great source of acting and improvisation. That simply delights in being able to create their paradoxical images almost out of nothing."

"This isn’t the most sophisticated show on the Fringe and, strictly speaking, it is really a show for kids. But it is, without question the most enjoyable and almost impossible not to love unless misanthrope is your middle name. It starts behind a massive paper backdrop, as four clowns loom in silhouette. Soon they appear on stage and engage in a bit of conventional banter and knockabout comedy, with one of them - long hair, doleful face - clearly the stooge for the other’s mischief. At one stage, one of the clowns tries to read a map, borrows a pair of glasses from a member of the audience, gives them back to the wrong person, and, in turn, gives their glasses to someone else and suddenly a good 16 people are trying to retrieve their glasses from complete strangers. Our mischievous hosts meanwhile have moved on with the show. You can scoff all you like at fancy notions of breaking down boundaries between audience and performers, but when it works, there’s truly nothing better, and there is no greater proof for that than Mimirichi. By the time the clowns have ripped the set into vast armfuls of shredded paper and advanced towards the audience, it is clear what is to come and the audience is ready for what must be the biggest paper fight ever to have graced an auditorium. Later they will cower behind a paper goalpost as one clown arranges an impromptu penalty shoot-out complete with massive paper football and a goalie plucked from the front row. At heart, Mimirichi celebrate the human capacity for playing - the clowns engage in several slapstick vignettes that celebrate the transformative powers of paper (they use it to create horses, monsters, an Arabian belly dancer). One of them, meanwhile, develops a despotic appetite, and, dressed as a king, clambers through the audience throwing articles of clothing into his belly. Beneath the fun and games there is something profound - and profoundly moving - going on, crystalised in the tremendous finale. Quite simply, the show’s big heart puts you in touch not just with your own humanity, but with that of your fellow man."