Cirque du Soleil: Ovo – Royal Albert Hall, London

Writer, Director and Choreographer: Deborah Colker

Canadian-born Cirque du Soleil has been dazzling the world for over 40 years with shows featuring spectacular acrobatic skills and brilliant sets, costumes and music. The show Ovo is true to form.  First performed in 2009, it’s an imaginative look at the life of insects. Cheeky Bumble Bees dance exuberantly down the aisles of the Royal Albert Hall before the show starts, and soon the stage fills with all sorts of creeping, leaping creatures. The costumes by Liz Vandal are all superb, but in the opening numbers, it is the glorious grasshoppers, with their angled legs, that particularly catch the eye.

Red Ants perform wonderfully coordinated foot juggling. Lying on their backs, the five-person troupe keep large pieces of kiwi fruit and sweet corn forever spiralling with their pedalling movements, later tossing the pieces from one to another with ease.

Particularly beautiful is a solo act by Cooper Yarosloski as the hand balancing Dragonfly. Clad in iridescent blues and greens, his movements are hypnotically calm and graceful.  Other notable acts in the first half include the exquisite duet between Caitlin Quinn and Ernesto Lea Place as Butterflies, performing on aerial straps, which manages to be both erotic and tender.

There’s also a delightful solo ‘Cocoon’ performed by Svetlanda Delous. It’s a simple aerial act, Delous trapped inside a dangling cocoon of silky fabric, quietly struggling to emerge. When she does, the untangled silk becomes her wings.

In between these various acrobatic movements of Ovo is a rather shadowy storyline. The title Ovo refers to the huge egg seen on stage at the start. This then deflates to be replaced by a more modestly sized egg, which is dragged on stage by the Bluebottle. The concept, too, seems to deflate. Where the huge egg had promised something about the mystery of life and a future of teeming insect life, the smaller egg has unfortunate echoes of the ball carried about by the dung beetles in the Čapeks’ The Insect Play. It seems to have become merely a burden.

The three clowns: Scarab Beetle, Master Flipo, the Bluebottle, the Voyager and the Ladybird offer a comic take on things. There’s a distinctly Teletubbies vibe to their gentle clowning and babbling speech. The characterisation of the Ladybird as a flirtatious lady, casting her eye on various male audience members before successfully wooing the Bluebottle, all feels a bit retro.

The first half ends with a wonderful ensemble piece on the aerial cradle with acrobats swung and thrown in breathtaking ways. The second half has an equally striking series of acts, the most compelling of which is first the Mongolian solo contortionist, Nyamgerel Gankhuyag, performing extraordinary movements as Spider.

But best of all is the fantastic display of TrampoWall and Tumbling by a large cast of international performers. As crickets in green costumes, they simply astonish by repeatedly leaping from trampolines to land on a sheer vertical wall. They don’t draw breath, but effortlessly run on upwards. Falling backwards onto the trampolines, they immediately bounce up and begin again. Honestly, you could watch them forever.

Throughout, vibrant bossa nova and samba are performed by a band of players led by Caroline Lemay, which includes oboe, flutes, accordion, banjo, guitars, percussion, violin and double bass, along with voice from Ju Rosario .Overall music direction is by Berna Ceppas, with Jonathan Deans as sound designer.

Runs until 1 March 2026