The pleasure of stumbling across new experiences

... But the main discovery of the month so far is altogether more joyous: a bunch of Ukrainian paper-tearing clowns: Around 1990, Italian "origami 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 cardboard. 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 ... dear me, no. They simply 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 anything: a football, a baby, a maneating monster, whatever. 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 endearingly 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 uncontrollable 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 performers 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 carried 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.
Ian Shuttleworth

Paper World Show, Mimirichi

Of course, not all clowns are evil. (I’m obliged to say that, in case the clown mobsters order a custard-pie hit.) Mimirichi: Paper World, known colloquially as “the weird Ukrainian clowns who rip bits of paper up”, is a case in point. We’re not talking origami here: Mimirichi are full-on scrunchers and shredders, destroying their paper-clad set over 80 minutes. This is a slow-burner of a show. It begins with a shadow-play featuring a man about to be crushed by a giant boot, then ambles soporifically to its mid-point. But the moment the four clowns stop passing paper between themselves and start chucking it into the stalls, the atmosphere changes. The ensuing paper-fight ends with the audience passing a huge sheet of the stuff to the back row, then to the front again. Call it manipulative, but the switch from anarchy to co-operation sent a tingle down the spine and brought the room to its feet.

Adrian Turpin, The Sunday Times, Uk

Paper World

Mimirichi
Riverside Studios

Review by Jackie Fletcher (2005)
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 recognisable 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 recognisable 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 sanitised 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 recognise their name should they come to a venue close to you at a future date.

Allison Vale reviewed this production on tour at the Thetare Royal, Bath, in 2008

Good on paper

Good on paper

THEATRE REVIEW
Mimirichi - Paper World
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.
Claire Allfree

Mimirichi - Paper World 4 stars, Edinburgh

Mimirichi - Paper World

4 stars Pod Deco, Edinburgh
Click here for all Edinburgh festival reviews

Lyn Gardner
Friday August 13, 2004

Guardian

Clowns and me are not a good combination. They don't like the fact I am an old grump, and I get irritated by the way they try too hard. But this Ukrainian quartet, each with their distinct personality, melted my stony heart. In fact, they could have come home with me and I wouldn't have complained.

They may not be as profound as Derevo's whey-faced strays or as heart-breaking as Slava, but they do succeed in making both young and old gurgle with laughter. This is undoubtedly the happiest 90 minutes I've spent on the Fringe this year.
It is a show that spreads a little joy and almost instantly turns the entire audience into a community as we join in a paper fight and pass giant sheets of paper over our heads. Dominated initially by a huge screen of paper behind which they play silhouette games peopled with giants and monsters, the company quickly move on to some simple and brilliantly handled audience participation, before getting down to the main event - tearing down the giant screen and letting everyone play with the paper.
It is amazing how quickly mature grown-ups revert to childhood given the chance to throw paper around and make a huge mess. The quartet don't quite have enough material to last the full 90 minutes, but the show is full of invention and madness, celebrating a lost childhood while also tapping into its fears.