Edinburgh 2014: Circa - Beyond, Underbelly

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the lack of female-led super hero movies. Joss Whedon’s attempts to bring Wonder Woman to the big screen came to nothing and while there’s apparently a female-led Marvel project on the cards for 2017, there’s a general sense of timidity about the whole thing

Well, fuck that, because Rowan Heydon White, of Australian contemporary circus company Circa, is Wonder Woman. She’s amazing. She can throws her male co-performers through the air, she can balance them on her back, she can catch their bodies in mid-flight with the same ease as one might catch a ball; at one point she takes a Rubik’s Cube and proceeds to solve it, while her company members clamber all over her, distracting her, standing on her, clinging to her. Like I said, she’s super.

There’s an edge of the uncanny to this show. An uneasy, dreamlike quality where giant rabbits frolic in the mist, bodies bend in unwise ways and people cluck and caw like birds. Theirs is a subverted world and while the performance celebrates the astonishing things of which the human body is capable – its strengths, its flexibility – it does so in a playful, intelligent way. “There’s a line between human and animal, between madness and sanity, between logic and dream,” the opening voice over intones. There’s no narrative as such, but this idea of the animalistic runs through the whole piece. We are all of us flesh.

The production has been around for a while – I first saw it in a Spiegeltent in Norwich last year – but it feels more developed now, the weirder elements, the air of oddness, better integrated into the piece. Several sequences have been dropped – the burlesque tennis racket contortion dance is no more and its loss is not felt. There are very few props, a trapeze, a couple of climbing bars, a stretch of black silk. Costumes are similarly minimal, apart from bear suits and bunny heads which lend the piece a darkly cartoonish aesthetic. Each performer gets a solo spot in which to showcase their particular skill set, self-destructive tumbling, some dizzying silk-work, a beautiful, nimble fingered paper waltz to the music of Bonnie Tyler. The group sequences, in which they hurl chairs through the air and fling themselves about the space, are if anything even more dazzling.

Along with the incongruous Frank Sinatra soundtrack, the applause of the audience is continually punctuated by little gasps and winces and squeals of excitement. There’s laughter too, because it’s hard not to laugh when a man in an oversized bear suit shimmies up a pole while Bach’s Goldberg Variations plays in the background. It’s a brilliant, beautiful, ridiculous moment of which this show contains many.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Edinburgh 2014: The Duck Pond, Bedlam

Some of my favourite shows of this year’s Fringe have involved people screaming. Men bellowing and raging in pain, woman shrieking in atonal, primal synchrony. But while screaming is sometimes a necessary response to the world, it’s not unwelcome to see a show whose defining characteristic is loveliness, which sets out to leave you beaming and – literally – feeds its audience cake.

withWings’ The Duck Pond is a candyfloss-flecked reworking of Tchaivosky‘s Swan Lake sans swans. Prince Siegfried has just turned 21 and is under pressure to marry. In truth he’s not much interested in girls but nonetheless his mother presses ahead with finding him a bride. As part of his birthday celebrations he visits a travelling fair, and as the moon rises he hooks himself a lucky duck – and ends up falling in love.

Odin, as is the way of such things, has been placed under a spell by the owner of the fair, a malevolent magician called Rothbart. By day he is a yellow plastic duck bobbing among his brethren but under the light of a balloon moon, he becomes human.

The production is all feathers and honey and loveliness. It is sweet and charming and packed full of little inventive touches designed to make you smile. There is music and dancing and the inevitable cascade of glitter, a dinky carousel, a coke bottle orchestra, and, as it’s a birthday, there are presents for everyone. The high point is a wonderfully playful and charming musical montage sequence in which the young Prince falls head over pointe for his enchanted duckling.

James Bennet and Tom Coxon both giving appealing performances as the Prince and his paramour, the musical number are skilfully performed and emotionally charged, sweeping over the audience, carrying you along on a wave of sugar water. Some of the ballet is a little wibbly and the shift towards the play’s tragic conclusion is a bit abrupt, but the ending is proper lump-in-the-throat stuff and there’s something hugely endearing and loveable about the whole exercise.

It’s a very youthful production, but in an energising way. You can clearly see the ripples of influences at work here, you can tell which companies these guys admire, it’s a little bit Kneehigh, a little bit Antler, a little bit Little Bulb, but there’s also plenty of invention and their attention to detail is admirable, even the programmes have been designed to look like party invites, a lovely touch. The whole thing has charm in abundance (though if you’re allergic to bobble-hatted whimsy this might not be one for you) but what’s lacking is a clear sense of identity as a company and they’re clearly more at ease with the visual than the verbal. They just need to pin that down, to find a voice that’s theirs alone.

Reviewed for Exeunt