Zippo’s Circus has temporarily dispensed with the big top, and set its circus performance in a pared down theatre format. It isn’t risk-free. The Big Top, full of the smells of sawdust and candy floss, is a large part of the attraction of a circus show, and gaudy costumes and excessive numbers of sequins are very much at home under painted canvas. A theatre setting encourages a more reflective, more judgemental, audience. Cirque Berserk passes that test comfortably. This is a splendid evening’s entertainment.
This is all fairly typical circus fare – the Timbuktu Tumblers doing acrobatics and limbo and constructing several different shapes of human pyramid; a ten person troupe of Chinese acrobats hurling each other through the air, catching each other with their feet, effortlessly doing double somersaults. There are jugglers and clowns, a lady from Mongolia called Odka, who climbs out of a bottle and performs archery with her feet.
There are sparkly women doing aerial acts on rings, on silks, on ropes. The Humpsti-Bumpsti clowns have a dustbin rigged to blow smoke rings. Everything is twice as exciting if it’s set on fire. And there’s a great big steel lattice ball, and at the end of each act, the Lucius Team from Brazil ride three genuine dirt bikes onto the Riverside stage, take them inside the big steel ball, and describe all manner of loops and arcs around each other and a female performer with a fixed smile stands very still in the midst of it. She may well be Nikol, who gets strapped to a wheel and spun around while Toni from the Czech Republic throws axes at her as the fixed smile is identical.
It is an evening of circus acts. They are not new and surprising acts, but they are spectacular, they are skilful, they make the audience go ‘Oooh!’, they are fun. The casual way an acrobat leaves the stage doing extended somersaults, the style with which the aerialist gathers her silks to get them off-stage, that’s part of the entertainment too. This show has been stage-managed really well – there are no long set changes, equipment is where it needs to be for a routine and then it’s gone, no hanging about.
This makes for a seamless show, two halves of 45 minutes, constant movement, lots of glittery glamour. The children are engrossed, so are the adults, then it’s done, the company bows, the stage is empty apart from a lingering scent of burnt two-stroke fuel and the memory of a bendy girl shooting arrows with her feet.
Runs until 11 March 2023
