THE AVERAGE person probably still thinks of mime as the kind or white-faced gestural acting popularised by Jean-Louis Barrault in the film Les Enfants du Paradis and by Marcel Marceau with his famous character Bip: an illustration of real life, clever but without great depth. The nadir of that form is too easily reached by the practitioners who stand gesticulating on city streets with a begging bowl at their feet.

      Henryk Tomaszewski was one of two Central European artists who, separately but concurrently, developed a richer alternative practice, he in Poland and his contemporary Ladislav Fialka in Czechoslovakia. They set out to use mime as an expressive medium on its own account, avoiding the frequently met dangers of seeming like dance without choreography or, on the other hand, drama without words: in either case a kind of cheap imitation of the real thing.

Fialka performed with a small supporting ensemble; Tomaszewski was content to stay out of the limelight him- self, and he worked on a bigger scale, creating narratives for a cast sometimes as large as thirty performers. The range of subjects he covcred was wide, too. To cite only the works he brought to London when he played two seasons, they included a staging of the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, about the David and Jonathan relationship of an eastern king and a shepherd boy; and Baggage, adapted from a story by the Danish novelist Herman Bang about a hotel page boy who commits suicide when life does not live up to his expectations.

A tale of intrigue, spells, jealousy and revenge, The Dress was based on a Japanese legend, and a comedy called Garden of Love, performed to a Mozart violin concerto, was apparently Tomaszewski's own invention. There were also some shorter exercises.

He appeared to like displaying the muscular physique of the men in his company, and sometimes achieved a powerful erotic effect, for instance when Gilgamesh's victory over a monster was celebrated by ritually bathing him in

milk. There were also moments of strikingly theatrical effect, such as when a fugitive in The Dress, hiding behind a wooden wall, was stabbed by a sword thrust through a gap between planks. Although fatally hurt, he managed as the sword was drawn from his body to wipe the blood from it with his hand, and thus saved from suspicion the priest who had sheltered him.

Born in Poznan, Henryk Tomaszewski first studied at the Cracow Ballet School, and danced with the company of Felix Parnell before joining the Polish National Ballet at the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw. He started his Polish Mime Ballet Theatre in Wroclaw in 1955 and subsequently toured the world.

His first visit to Britain, for a tour of the North in 1969, followed by a visit to The Place in London, led to a return invitation the following year to Sadler's Wells, where his programmes proved popular enough for an extra week to be added.

Besides productions for his own company, Tomaszewski staged some of his works for ballet companies, including the Royal Danish Ballet and the Dutch National Ballet as well as companies in Poland. More significant, however, were his example and his in- fluence as a teacher, through which he opened the way for a multiplicity of mime practitioners who followed him and who have been able to produce the ever wider range of styles and procedures that flourish today.

Henryk Tomaszewski, mime artist and director, was born in Poznan, Poland, on November 20, 1919. He died in Kowary, Poland, on September 23, 2001, aged 81.

The Times