A creative and curiously confronting show from everyone’s favourite clown. Luke Rollason has many predictions, but there is one that stands above them all – ‘there will be walkouts’.
This feels like a highly concept-driven show for Rollason, who is normally escapism personified. Leave your own predictions at the door. Fol-de-Rol is beyond his usual clowning capers.
There’s a sense of deserved showboating here, demonstrating Rollason as a fine purveyor of his art. We see the Gaulier training – the flirtatiously nasty bouffon, the gleeful clown, the cartoonified edgelord. Changing our notion of what we expect from the chap dubbed by The Guardian as the ‘standard-bearer of UK clown’. Fol-de-Rol is much more than clown.
There’s plenty of the on-brand magic that fans will love. From hand-cut karaoke to pool boy playtime. But these moments of ingenious levity, and occasional sentimentality, are chopped up with cartoon-hero bondage masks and world news that may make the head spin. Take a cruise down memory lane, explore DIY dentistry and rock-out with your shock out. It’s jarring by intent.
Despite our final farewell giving a nod to there being no meaning, there’s an inevitability of bringing real-world issues into a clown space that tips things on their head. In harder-hitting bits, there may be the odd moment where we’re looking back longingly to that poolside. Never fear, we’re on a temporary holiday of the surreal – nothing stays the same for too long.
This is not your usual Rollason show. You can’t become a pioneer without ruffling a few feathers. This reviewer senses that keeping us surprised is part of the fun for Rollason. And perhaps that’s where his magic is, and has been all along.
Reviewed on 31 May.
