When you are feeling old and disappointed with the world in general and yourself in particular, the Belgium clown duo Okidok will provide a cure. I have always thought that clowns would make an enormous contribution to life if they would just stop trying so hard to make us all laugh. The great trick of Okidok is that they don't appear to even try: they are too busy getting over the astonishing miracle of their own existence and falling over their great feet. As a result, the audience of all ages is soon helpless with laughter.
Xavier Bouvier and Benoit Devos have more than a touch of the Beckett clown about them. In their ghostly, ragged, faintly Elizabethan garb, they might be jokers who have always been lurking on an empty stage waiting for an audience - they seem as amazed to see us as they are to see each other - and who will be there for eternity taking their bows, like proud, shy children who have just completed their party piece. They don't seem to realise that the joke is on them. But maybe it isn't; maybe it's on us.
Making their London debut as part of the London International Mime festival, Okidok put traditional clowning into a more theatrical context with their show Ha Ha Ha, which has a loose sketch format. The stories may change - the accidents with a tower of boxes, the man who fences himself in, the desperate attempts to reach a carrot on a stick - but the personas remain the same. I kept thinking of Bashful in Snow White, though this is infinitely funnier and sadder. It is like watching two people who are trying to operate in the world but have no grasp of the rules. Although the show makes no such claims for itself, it struck me that at its most profound, Ha Ha Ha shows us what mental illness must be like.
There are extraordinary levels of skill and comic control operating here. The smallest mistake in timing would bring the whole edifice tumbling down. But there are no tumbles. Instead, the show sends you back out into a dark, cold world feeling as if you had a little piece of the sun secretly stashed in your pocket.
· Until Tuesday. Box office: 020-7960 4242. Then touring to Leicester and Croydon.
