Joan Rivers remembered by Sean Foley: 'she eviscerated the audience'

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/08/joan-rivers-remembered-sean-foley

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Behind the mask – provide your own joke here (or use one of hers) – Joan Rivers was like many a performer, particularly those at the high end of the precarious business of comedy: insecure and neurotic. But she had the wit and balls to alchemise her vulnerabilities into a version of herself for our entertainment. And she had a truly astonishing lifelong drive to put that version of herself in front of people and try to make them laugh.

It surprises me that people often didn't see that what she was doing was an act. A very perceptive and sensitive person, Joan was in many ways what she had always wanted to be as a young New Yorker taking classes at the Actors' Studio – an incredible actor. Or rather, she was a sort of ultra-acerbic clown: an outlandishly dressed and painted pixie-harpy, who said whatever she liked. She was the joke, and she knew it. She used the appearance of vulgarity, shallowness and crass spitefulness, to tell truths and satirise herself and society.

I was happy to learn that her refusal to consider anything sacrosanct extended to herself and her material. You would struggle to find a performer more eager to throw things away, re-invent, improvise, change and completely re-examine what she did the night before. "What did you hate most?"; "That stank…"; "Let's put this in tonight!" She was old school, and wanted to be a good actor: she grafted, she listened, she tried everything you might suggest. Her writing was as honed and crafted as, in a completely different comic key, PG Wodehouse's (though she could do it off the top of her head as well). Her performances were as thought through as any leading actor's on the stage of the National Theatre. Really.

To be honest, we never got the show completely right – an autobiographical piece that thoroughly mangled the boundaries between theatre, standup and reminiscence. In it, she talked about her life – her early career struggles, stardom, her husband's suicide, the "wilderness years", sex for the over-60s, the death of Mae West. But some nights, as she led the audience from comic high to soul-searching low with a seeming cavalier disregard for decorum of any kind, she just made all the boundaries disappear. Un-directable brilliance took over. Her incredible contact with, and ability to play, the live audience enabled her to just take them apart, eviscerate them even.

Joan provoked incredulity mixed with a weird kind of rapture, as she said the unsayable – and they doubled over in laughter again and again. People in theatre talk about catharsis – that's exactly the experience she was able to give: a kind of liberation.

Some people didn't find her funny. But then some people didn't laugh at Morecambe and Wise, either. Show business is pretty brutal, and audiences just get rid of you if they're not interested: Joan had a 50-year career. She was an historic person in comedy and entertainment. Was she a perfect human being? Are you kidding me? But she was one of the most amazingly talented and original performers I have ever seen, let alone had the privilege to work with.

Joan Rivers, 1933-2014

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