The Pianist

Overview

Piano recitals: once the failsafe antidote to insomnia, now take on a whole new meaning in this silent comedy which promises to have its audiences in fits.

The Pianist tells the tale of an extraordinarily elegant (or so he thinks) pianist, determined to put on a beautiful, highbrow performance. However, he becomes so preoccupied in his efforts to impress everyone that the show rapidly descends from a sophisticated affair into a mad scramble of bedlam.

The show is a solo comic contemporary circus piece by Thomas Monckton (Moving Stationary), a circus artist born in New Zealand and trained at New Zealand's only circus school CircoArts and at the physical theatre school of Jacques Lecoq in Paris and Circo Aereo, in collaboration with Circo Aereo, an international contemporary circus group from Finland that is based in Finland and France but the troupe frequently performs around the world.

Their show arrives in New Zealand fresh from a five-star reviewed season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and a sell-out season at Circa Two in 2014, and has been described as “a superb performance… he charms the spectators mere seconds into the show, and bombs them with side-splitting comedy and moments of astonishment through all of the sixty minutes.”.