As the curtain falls, everyone in the theatre is on their feet, demanding one more set of bows from the sweat-drenched company of acrobats, aerialists and musicians in Thi rr e's new show, Au Revoir Parapluie. The theatre is in the small town of Chalon-sur-Sa ne in Burgundy, near where his father's family - "the Thi rr e dynasty," he calls them - are based. This is as close to a home crowd as Thi rr e gets; he hasn't had much chance to put down roots.
His mother, Victoria, is the daughter of Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, Oona O'Neill. Victoria and Thi rr e's father, Jean-Baptiste, pioneered the new wave of circus performances in the 1970s and 1980s. As children, Thi rr e and his sister Aur lia toured the world with them, a happy band of extraordinary entertainers.
His first role, aged four, was as a walking suitcase. Now 33, Thi rr e is, like his grandfather, better known for physical comedy - the kind that can spark an audience's imagination with the flexing of a muscle, or turn an innocent, everyday prop into a magical object. He's also an acrobat, trapeze artist, violinist, and dancer, and, with the help of the company he founded in 1998, he creates a shape-shifting spectacle that moves between the mundane and the implausible, from slapstick laughs to awe-struck gasps.
Thi rr e's first two shows, 1998's The Junebug Symphony and 2003's La Veill e des Abysses, toured Europe to critical acclaim. Au Revoir Parapluie erupts from the same vivid imagination, featuring, among other lyrical, surreal scenes, a man whose heartbeat goes on the run around his body, and a giant sea creature absconding with a married woman. Even now, Thi rr e is still making changes to the show.
How does he know when the formula is just right? "The truth is, I don't," he says. "It's very imprecise, it's very instinctive.
You have to listen and take into account the laughs, and the silences, but also the feeling from the inside." This show has more of a sense of character than his previous ones; the performers are given some identity, motivations and yearnings. But Thi rr e still resists concrete meaning.
He seems somehow to require both complete chaos and absolute control. In solo skits, Thi rr e is a man baffled by untameable forces - an escaping limb, an unruly prop - but to achieve such freedom requires exact physical control. Similarly, Thi rr e piles up ideas for his shows - "funny ideas, weird ideas, dance ideas" - but when it comes to the final cut, "it's not a democracy.
I'm really a dictator in the company." He also acts, and has just finished filming the title role of Bartleby, in an adaptation by Wim Wenders of the classic Herman Melville story. The Wall Street clerk mainly repeats the line, "I would prefer not to," as a small stand against authority and change.
Compared with the physical excesses of Thi rr e's stage shows, this role is about as minimal as it gets. "You're sitting looking at one other actor, and for five weeks you just say the same line and you try to keep the faith. I'm not allowed to use my body and do anything crazy and weird - I just have to be there and talk and be normal.
Somehow that's very exotic." The film was shot in part using an original early-1900s hand-crank camera, which Thi rr e was wary of because of the connection to his grandfather's films. He already gets people asking if he's doing a homage to Chaplin every time he falls off a chair; Thi rr e says that, in truth, he wasn't very aware of his heritage until other people started making a big deal out of it.
Chaplin died when he was a toddler, and his mother always assiduously avoided trading on the family name. Thi rr e is already planning the next big show, with a strong story, a riot of circus performers and singers, and for the first time, text. But as he gets older he is also finding himself drawn to a simpler, stripped-back way of working.
He is realising that, with the physical instrument he has spent his whole life tuning, it might be enough just to let it sing. "You don't have to do amazing special effects - that's what I feel more and more as I get more experienced," he says. "You don't have to do so much to take people on a trip.
" Au Revoir Parapluie at Sadler's Wells, London, from October 30. Box office: 0844 412 4300.
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