Oh, what a Circus…Hang On
Something terrible has happened to the circus. First it became vegetarian and politically correct. Then it became anodyne and corporate. These developments were represented by Circus Oz on the one hand, Cirque du Soleil on the other.
What happened to the Big Top, the sawdust, the lions, the performing seals and the dancing girls?
You’ve had it, chum. The nearest you can get to all that now is Zippo’s Circus which beetles modestly about the place in a greatly reduced version of the old-fashioned Chipperfields or Billy Smart’s; and now Sylvester McCoy tells me they even pinched his clown routines from the old Ken Campbell Road Show.
So I’m not all that interested to know that City Circ, “London’s new season for Theatre and Contemporary Circus” has just been launched, or that Moira Sinclair, the Arts Council’s executive director, has declared that “the development of circus artists and circus production continues to be a priority for Arts Council England.”
I therefore start on the wrong foot with something like Hang On, the new collaboration of Sue Buckmaster’s Theatre-Rites and the trio of aerialists known as Ockham’s Razor, which has just opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith.
But, do you know what? I ended up really loving this show.
It starts very annoyingly, with the actors traipsing on to inspect some costumes hanging from wire hangers suspended from the flies. But those hangers, or triangles, develop into larger versions of themselves, floating steel bowsprits that accommodate some extraordinary gyrations and finally form a giant mobile, a sort of celestial playground of the infantile eternity.
Hang On is not all that brilliantly conceived. A bloke called Eric talks to the audience as though it were composed of idiots and backward children, like some hideous throwback to Playschool or Blue Peter, and a juggler with a thick Italian accent (probably because he’s a thick Italian) seems terribly pleased with himself for tossing around a few red balls.
But as Eric takes a back seat and the juggler is progressively expunged from the proceedings, the Ockham’s Razor guys get going on their love triangles and aerial acrobatics, often hanging from each other’s feet, with no safety net, accompanied by the crazy drumming of a strange and silent Japanese lady.
It’s not about anything at all, this show, apart from the physical abilities and skills of the performers, although Arts Council England will breathe a right-on sigh of relief when they read in the publicity material that “ultimately, the cast will try and find their place, or their balance, within a precarious world.”
The Lyric was packed on Friday night with children of all ages, but there’s still no escaping the fact that circus, or its name, has been commandeered by the do-gooding middle classes in the entertainment industry, and has moved a very long way from its roots in vaudeville and popular entertainment.
I suppose this all started with street theatre in the mid 1970s, a phenomenon in Europe and South America that has a very great deal to answer for, in my view.
She still floats through the air with the greatest of ease, that beautiful girl on the flying trapeze. But she’s probably in a fringe theatre, not a big candy-coloured striped canvas tent. And she’s got a degree in anthropology and doesn’t eat sausages or go to bullfights, more’s the pity.