WORLD CRITS

Edinburgh Festival

Julian Chagrin has a face like rubber which he moulds and slaps into fabulously funny effects.
His show is the ideal after dinner entertainment, there is no effort required, you just sit back and laugh!
His tactics are deceptively simple … he takes for the most part everyday situations and lets his inventive
and highly amusing imagination get to work in mime.
The way the sketches are executed is quite brilliant and I was left with nothing but admiration.
One of my favorites was the skit on the dog. After the animal has been put through the indignities of begging,
playing games and being smothered with “affection”, it digs a hole and promptly pops in its owner.
Bizarre but hilarious in the Chagrin way.
But to go through the routine of explaining his wit really spoils the effect…it has to be seen, savoured and enjoyed.
To go to the theatre and come out aching with laughter is an experience I’d almost forgotten existed.
Edinburgh Evening News  (at the Edinburgh Festival)

Chagrin is an artist of multi-edged wit.
In his world of articulate mime the human spirit  seems to hover uneasily between a shriek of laughter and a barely subdued scream of apprehension.
He gives a hard-etched image of man tackling the unexpected and outrageous with supremely sophisticated ease.
The Scotsman (at the Edinburgh Festival)

London born he trained in Paris for three years and has, in his time, worked everywhere from a Soho Strip Club to the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris to the last British travelling seaside revue to the London Palladium.
Dressed in black Chagrin is physically alone on stage, but, with flashes of face and hands, draws out of the air scenes and situations, characters and structures, which become visible to the audience –and then, in an instant rubs out a mood and draws again on a blackboard of empty stage and air.
Such is - dare one say it? - real art, the real and ancient art of drama. And of course it’s a symbolic portrayal of man alone, utterly dependent upon what is within him.
But Chagrin is more than a unique artist; he is also the sort of glorious nut our dull age needs!
He is superb and 80 minutes with him flash by with the swiftness of his hands.
The Glasgow Herald (at the Edinburgh Festival)

Dublin Festival

This late night revue is a tour de farce! (sic). This half Irish Willowy wit is superb. He ranges from clown to satirist to simple belly-laugh man.
Chagrin sails through a grinding physical routine with an athlete’s fitness. His timing is stop-watch perfect He is howlarious.
Evening Press at the Dublin Festival

As a rule I am allergic to One Man Shows, but I must confess to having been enthralled by Julian Chagrin’s athletic artistry in mime, his perfect timing in action pieces – silent comedy he calls it – and his consummate skill in putting across with the minimum of words his hilarious sketches.
Sunday Independent at the Dublin Festival

Julian Chagrin is billed as a mime and he is a consummately good one when he wants to be. Fortunately for us all he does not always wish to remain mute with the result that his programme is more total comedy than pure mime and the man himself closer to Keaton or Tati than to Marcel Marceau.
He is convulsingly masterfully and unmercifully funny.
Mr Chagrin’s technique is generally to take an apparently ordinary situation and then to blow it relentlessly up into absurdity of gigantic proportions.
His face moves more slowly and effectively than that of any other comic or clown I have seen.
It’s an evening somewhere between Laurel and Hardy, Vaudeville, “Beyond the Fringe” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and on through the wacky world of Human absurdity..
Overall he uses the most devastating irreverence of his subjects, his own technique and even his ideas so that there is never a moment of sentimentality and never a moment when he cannot, if he so chooses, surprise us.
He is the funniest man in an age of live theatre and should on no account be missed.
The Irish Times at the Dublin Festival

Australia

THIS MAN IS THE FUNNIEST
Time might produce a peer but there’s every chance that Julian Chagrin is the funniest man who’ll entertain Melbourne this year.
He is performing at the Last Laugh Comedy Club for only a couple of weeks (a shame for this man could keep Melbournians laughing for the rest of the year)
For those who haven’t heard of him, Chagrin is a British import, a talking mime comedian whose style of act and humor is something of a Monty Python-Marcel Marceau- Mel Brooks blend.
Chagrin writes his own material, much of it needle-sharp in wit and satire and his ability to perform it rounds off a mighty fine comic talent.
The man’s encore – an hilarious sketch in which Chagrin sits and imitates a couple of dozen different forms of laughter – is almost worth whatever proportion of the bill covers the entertainment.
The first half of his show is a series of sketches, which entail everything from a kung fu fight with a chair to a long distance call to St Francis of Assisi.
If it’s food and fun you seek for a good night out catch Julian Chagrin before his season ends.
The Sun, Melbourne, at the comedy festival

JULIAN IS GOOD FOR YOU
I haven’t laughed as much for a long time. So if provoking comedy is what comedy should be mainly about, Julian Chagrin is one of the greatest funnymen you could see.
The response last night to his opening show at the Last Laugh Comedy Club, points to him as the hit of that establishment’s four month international comedy festival.
He has formidable talents, from the perceptive wit, finely honed sense of the absurd and cheerful tolerance, to expressive face and limbs, coupled with the grace of a dancer.
His show is brilliantly thought out; so very clever without being complicated or in any way condescending.
Impersonating a rooster may not seem an ideal basis on which to build a show, but that opening segment was a scream, and the standard never faltered.
Such a mundane thing as an encounter with a chair became a whimsical delight; a radio commentary on a Mime was totally hilarious, a survey of laughter infectious.
It was a magnificent sustained effort,
the marvelous Mr. Chagrin is therapeutic – you feel so much better for having seen him!
The Herald Melbourne at the Melbourne Comedy Festival

CHAGRIN, YOU MUST LAUGH
To my Chagrin I just can’t rave enough about Julian Chagrin.
And just when you thought a bad review was due…tsk, tsk.
As the name implies the man does cause ‘mortification”.
Last night well known members of the Townsville undergrowth were seen with their shutters down, letting it all hang out…THINK!!
Did you abandon yourself last night in a civic theatre aisle; did you catch yourself letting out a whopper, did you suffer embarrassing spasms in public?
Did you slap your thighs resoundingly all night in the seat next to mine?
If the answer is yes, then send money to this newspaper – if not, front up at the theatre tonight and put yourself in jeopardy.
For without a word of a lie, Julian Chagrin from the immense shadow of his nose to the bum of his heart, dispels nitrous oxide like CO2.
Prepare from his first imposing entrance as cock rooster of the fowl yard to sit in the palm of his hand, and therein to squawk, titter, wheeze or painfully vibrate in silence when required.
His sketches include an encounter with a cherub, a look at life with and without the machinations and 101 ways to wear a woman. He does this skit with the help of his wife, Israeli actress, clown, comedienne and dog’s body, Rolanda Chagrin.
With rare irony, many of Chagrin’s sketches, hilarious as they are, say the saddest things about this century of ours.
The mealy-mouthed lady with the cigarette butt, the desperate commuter…
The send-up I loved was “Mime for Radio” where an ignorant sport commentator tries, and fails lamentably, to describe a serious piece of Mime over the radio. Both are done by Chagrin and never the twain do meet.
Julian Chagrin is not a man to underestimate.
Under the constipated face of this master comedian is a whiff of something that will keep you wondering….
The Townsville Daily Bulletin, Queensland Australia