The legendary sage of mime makes a welcome return to the Fringe here with a piece of work that really shows them how it’s done.

Wakenshaw was an award nominee in 2015 for Nautilus, but his impact is perhaps less recognised now as physical performers have moved more towards the Gaulier school of clowning and away from Wakenshaw’s classical mime style. There’s something timeless about his approach; he’s a delightful Buster Keaton of the mind’s eye.

The new show’s title, Silly Little Things, is both true and deliberately misleading: this is the stuff of life and death. Wakenshaw pushes through the rain on a stormy night, lights a fire in his cottage and, with a sudden reversal of his body, switches into one of the festival’s funniest surprises, which I won’t spoil here. That sets the stage for the narrative – a beautiful, poignant and wonderfully funny silent play of a lonely magician who keeps accidentally killing his assistants. 

Wakenshaw is so obviously a master of his craft that it almost doesn’t warrant mentioning, but it’s easy to take for granted how perfectly he calibrates every movement, distilling each imaginary object into a few simple movements that immediately suggest the real thing.

One of the most impressive aspects of this show is how often he returns to the work of his magician character – he performs card tricks with an empty hand and no cards, holding up nothing at all and silently asking, ‘Is this your card’? and the audience reacts like it’s watching David Copperfield. A later passage invites an audience member on stage to become the magician in some of the sweetest and funniest audience participation I’ve seen in clowning.

The invisible magic is briefly in danger of outstaying its welcome, but then a scene set in the smoking area of a nightclub becomes a weirdly beautiful one-man sex scene, then love, then marriage, then babies, growing up, loss, ageing, death.

It’s not unusual for mimes to try and capture life’s whole arc in their work (see Dr Brown’s last show) but Wakenshaw speaks on it with the utmost eloquence. Life speeds up and happens in a moment, and the fact that the beats of his montage are familiar only makes it more magical.