Deburau: Pierrot, Mime, and Culture

The last specialised study of Deburau (the most famous and influential mime actor of all time) in French or English was the biography by Tristan Remy in 1954, Jean-Gaspard Deburau.

This book is very wide-ranging: starting with Deburau’s Pierrot figure, it discusses nineteenth-century theatre, novels, poetry, society, and twentieth-century echoes in cinema and modern mime.

Readers who think they know who and what ‘Pierrot’ is (and was) will be surprised by what they find in this book; for example, his relation to colonialism and race.

There are 26 figures in the book, all of them discussed in depth.

Deburau is well-known among scholars, and the wider public know his image even if they can’t necessarily put a name to it, but he has never been studied through such a wide range of manuscript as well as published sources, many of them identified for the first time.