Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Paulina Lenoir – Puella Eterna
Paulina Lenoir
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Clown, Comedic, Comedy, One Person Show, Performance Art, Physical Comedy, Solo Show
Venue: Assembly Roxy - Downstairs
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Paulina Lenoir is Puella Eterna, a globe trotting poet with great taste in clothes. She wants to show you life in all its forms and all its wonder. Transporting you from cradle to grave in an explosively colourful journey and a costume change at every turn, of course! A wonderful, bizarre and hilarious show by a masterful clown who is pushing the boundaries of how we see the genre.
Review
A Swiss-Mexican Clown…. It’s a great start to an exceptional show.
The audience waits in anticipation for the show to begin and feasts their eyes on the stage adorned with tulle of all persuasions, dangling in sheer ruffles for all to see, a high heel resting suggestively on a plinth and a table full of intriguing accoutrement, you can see the designer in Lenoir playing with your imagination from the very start.
She bursts onto the stage, a vision in rouge, a gigantic bow adorning her head like a frothy present begging to be unwrapped. She announces she is a poet with a devilish glint in her eye. Serious, wide eyed and hilarious. Puella Eterna or Aeterna, the eternal girl, resistant to growing up and resistant to change. However the change of ageing is something no one can avoid but we can age playfully. As Puella, Lenoir wants you to come with her throughout all the stages in the life of a woman and marks each stage of the journey with poetic verse and fantastical costume changes. Lenoir has you in the palm of her hand from the get go.
Her wide eyed wonder as a baby, a scarily switched on toddler through to adolescence, womanhood and finally the fragility of old age Lenoir seamlessly switches costumes and moods in the blink of an eye. Her timing impeccable, her delivery extreme and her gestures grand.
I personally don’t like audience participation shows however Lenoir’s seasoned presence on stage allows her to carefully manipulate the audience with care without feeling forced and include them in her absurd antics without it being awkward with crowd work so adept and kind that you were powerless to resist. In fact, the audience help and affect acclaimed poet Puella Eterna in her life cycle, aiding her to weave her tale with beauty, poignancy and delight from birth through to death.
Visually arresting throughout you marvel at how she can create such different worlds upon the small stage at the Assembly Roxy Downstairs. Simple pieces of furniture transform into dynamic props, plain fabrics swish to create other worlds in an instant before being replaced a split second later by the next innovative delight. Throwing herself wildly around the stage with brash abandon but never knocks the microphone stand centre stage, we are witnessing a master at work.
I was enticed at the beginning, enthralled throughout and jettisoned into floods of tears and floods of laughter in equal measure by the end. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house, nor should there have been.
A relatable, iconic and effecting experience that takes clowning to the next level.
