The ringmaster of Cirque du Soleil

By DAVID THOMAS

Whenever Guy Laliberte visits London, he's particular about the view from his hotel room.

"I first came to London when I was 18," he explains. "I spent the first night on a bench in Hyde Park. So since the money came in I've always tried to take hotel rooms looking out at that corner of the park. I used to stay at the Hilton. Now I'm at the Metropolitan. But it's important that I don't forget where I come from."

It's a sweet enough story, but who is Guy Laliberte? Well, he's a 41-year-old of medium height, a slim build just beginning to soften up around the middle, sandy hair just beginning to recede.

He's also the founder of the Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based avant-garde circus troupe.

Which doesn't sound wildly impressive until you realise that the Cirque is not just a troupe of acrobats and clowns, but an organisation with 2500 staff (650 of them performers) running eight large productions controlled from regional offices in Las Vegas, Amsterdam and Singapore. Laliberte owns it all, 100 per cent. He's one of the richest, most powerful theatrical impresarios.

Right now there are two permanent Cirque shows in Las Vegas, plus others in Disneyworld, another traversing the States, a fourth opening in Auckland this week and a fifth that has just pitched its huge tent on the south bank of the Thames, in the shadow of Battersea Power Station, where it will perform a new show called Quidam.

The productions are built and budgeted on a Hollywood scale. It costs about $32.2 million to put a Cirque show on the road, on top of $38.7 million for the tent in which it plays. But that's nothing compared with the permanent productions, which need specially built theatres. The budget for the Disneyworld show, La Nouba, was more than $129 million. The bigger of the two Vegas productions, called O, came in at $225 million plus.

Now they are all about to be eclipsed because Cirque isn't just planning to perform in a tent at Battersea Power Station. According to plans it will be providing a new, permanent show, based in a custom-built 2000-seat theatre that will be the centrepiece of the long-awaited redevelopment of the Battersea site.

Laliberte does not talk in the slow, measured tones of suit-land. He prefers a turbocharged stream of consciousness that blazes away - his hands gesticulating, his face lit with enthusiasm, his accent transatlantic French - like a cross between a Left Bank philosopher debating the finer points of structuralism and a fairground barker luring pretty girls into the Tunnel of Love.

"Battersea Power Station is more than just a great landmark of London," he says. "It has with that reality the potential of being a great landmark in Europe.

"Great projects are achieved with great complicity, but also in the recognition that it cannot just be a creative pole or just a business pole. It will arrive and it will be achieved with a great balance between the recognition of each of those poles and each respecting the reality of the other one. And ... "

Laliberte would have continued like that, uninterrupted, for the full hour of the interview, had I not butted in and suggested we cover a little of his background.

He grew up in Montreal, the son of a corporate PR executive and a nurse.

"It was a typical French Canadian family," he recalls. "There was always a reason for a party, always music in the house. But I never really played anything. My parents tried to get me piano lessons, but I was always giving up. I was never into the notion of structuring the learning process. At school, I was smart at getting good marks. But," and here he bursts out laughing, "I won't tell you how I was getting them!"

At 14, Laliberte hit the road. It was not a gesture of rebellion. He adores his parents - indeed, they are staying with him in London, along with his wife and two young children.

But, he says, "I was just a little dreamer, fascinated by the cultures of the world. And the best way of travelling was to learn a job which would permit me to wake up one day and go to the other side of the planet if I wanted to.

"So, I was a street musician, playing the traditional music of my country, telling stories, passing the hat on. My big breakthrough was when I came to Europe and spent a year doing festivals. I learnt to fire-breathe, juggle, do little magic tricks. I built up a passion for street-performing acts."

Laliberte returned to Canada and found a job on a hydro-electric dam; after three days, the workers went on strike. Suddenly he was back in Montreal, getting regular strike-pay from his union with a summer stretching out before him. So he did what any other kid at a loose end would do. He founded a theatre company. On stilts.

Laliberte started out as a performer. But it became clear that he had a head for business, so he became the manager, too. The company performed all over Quebec and helped to organise an international festival of street performers in Montreal. Then, in 1984, came its big break.

It was the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada by Europeans, and the Government had money to spend on cultural celebrations.

Laliberte and his troupe were commissioned to assemble a touring company, taking themselves and their street performers on the road. The show was performed under a tent, so Laliberte called it Cirque du Soleil.

In 1987 the Cirque reached the United States, appearing at an arts festival in Los Angeles.

"For us it was live or die in LA," Laliberte says. "We had no money. If we'd failed, we wouldn't be able to put gasoline in our trucks to come back home. We were living at the edge."

He made a deal with the festival organisers: you guarantee to pack the opening night with celebrities, we'll do everything else. The stars turned up, the reviews were ecstatic and suddenly the Cirque was hot.

"After the opening night we became the taste of the month in LA. And if you survive that, you can become the event of the year. And after that, you can become a citizen of the LA artistic community, and that's what we've built on."