Silent movie music, a title card on a screen – then a thin man in baggy pants and tight jacket walks out, a hat sitting atop curly hair, and a trademark moustache perching on his expressive mouth. It couldn’t be anyone other than Charlie Chaplin, and Marcel Cole has captured his look and movement perfectly.

Cole opens with a recreation of the silent classic ‘The Gold Rush’, his exemplary physical theatre skills on show as he leans on an invisible bar, gets chased by a policeman (plucked from the audience), and tries to eat the leather of his shoe. It’s a marvellous act, capturing Chaplin’s glances that must show so much when you have no words beyond the handful that make it as title cards.

Cole’s show contains the highlights (and a few lowlights) of Chaplin’s career, from being in a circus with his brother Sydney, then being discovered on an American tour to become a movie star. Chaplin’s reluctance to create ‘talkies’, concerned his particular style wouldn’t work with spoken words, means the first half of Cole’s show has him entirely silent, save for a few whispered directions to his supporting actors pulled from the audience.

Cole shows Chaplin as a clown, a comedic genius, but also as an imperfect man who fell in and out of love a lot. He is respectful of Chaplin, perhaps treading too lightly and humorously over some of his indelicate scandals, but Cole shows us a man who changed the shape of cinema both in front of and behind the camera.