The London International Mime Festival is now 40 years old. Each January devotees or the merely curious can see short runs of well over a dozen shows at an assortment of venues in the city. This year the Barbican Centre, Soho Theatre + Writers’ Centre, the Southbank Centre, Shoreditch Town Hall and elsewhere host international artists including Germany’s Familie Flöz, Belgium’s Charleroi Danses, the Nordic Puppet Ambassadors from Finland and the UK’s Gandini Juggling Project, among a clutch of others.

As those names may suggest, the Festival’s understanding of mime goes far beyond mute white-faced fellows trapped in invisible boxes.  Partly due to LIMF necessarily spreading its net wide but more as a result of its having educated two generations of audiences in international developments in the field, the term “mime” is now effectively understood to include components of puppetry, circus... basically, any form of theatrical presentation in which the words, if there are any at all, are distinctly secondary to the physical and/or visual elements.

In opening-week show Barons Perchés, for instance, the only speech exchanged by the two performers is in a kind of international vocalise; the core of their dialogue takes place on and around a trampoline which forms most of the floor of the cabin in which they find themselves. If this sounds abstract, the reality is much more firmly connected to extant artworks. In the mid-noughties, France’s Compagnie Mpta/Mathurin Bolze created a piece entitled Fenêtres based on Italo Calvino’s early novel The Baron In The Trees; as the title might suggest, Barons Perchés is their follow-up to that show.

Bolze and Karim Messaoudi play older and younger versions of the baron in question, who spurns the conventions of his life on the ground and resolves to live "in three dimensions" in a treehouse. At first not even coinciding in the cabin, the two come to occupy the same space independently of each other and finally to acknowledge each other and co-operate in successively complex routines. They bounce off the walls, around the furniture and each other, and barely refrain from swinging off the assortment of light fittings. Physically, it is breathtaking;  communicatively, less so. The programme asks whether one figure is the other’s brother, shadow or imaginary friend, but the premise pretty much gives the game away. I have to admit that the more impressive the performance grew, the less able I felt to follow the content.

Written for the Financial Times.