Chapter 267: On Margaret Atwood, Sisters and Circus Maids

Get thee to a nunnery!

Next week at Sadlers Wells East Ben Duke and his company Lost Dog is bringing The Last Hamlet to Sadlers Wells East. Ever since I've saw his Paradise Lost at the Battersea Arts Centre, I've wanted to see more. Around the time I booked the tickets I received the news of the death of a sister. Not my biological sister, but a religious sister who I'd know at the school I had gone to for sixth form as Sr Lizzie, and then twenty years later met as Sr Ann (reverting to birth name, thanks to Vatican II, rather than the one appointed when taking vows) at the Bar Convent, where she was running the guest house, one of York's hidden gems. A convenient stone's throw from the railway station, by the iconic Mikelgate, on the corner of Blossom Street and Nunnery Lane, the entrance has a discreet sign on the glass of the entrance doors, welcoming people of all faiths and none, and those of us swinging somewhere on a pendulum. The rooms are modern, in the large glass atrium above a beautiful mosaic floor is served cracking cooked breakfasts and cream teas, the chapel hosts LGBTQI+ Mass once a month, and their Living Heritage Museum is state of the art interactive and fascinating. 

We had first gone up to York a couple of years ago to see another sister, Mary Ann, up in the retirement home on the same street, and when my daughter heard the news this time her immediate response was, effectively, "get thee, and me, back!" We had also been drawn out of curiosity to the Bar Convent by the fact that it housed the relic of the  hand of St Margaret Clitherow, a Yorkshire martyr from Elizabethan times, which is on display in the chapel there. Margaret was executed for her Catholic faith and harbouring priests, despite (or, it's rumoured, because of) her step-father, Henry May, being  the Lord Mayor of York. She refused to plea, to avoid her children having to be called upon at her trial, and so was condemned for her silence to a horrific death by being pressed to death by heavy weights, under her own front door, on the bridge over the Ouse. She was rumoured to be pregnant too. When Elizabeth I heard about it she was so horrified at what had been done to the woman that no Catholic was ever executed in that way again. Mary Ward, the founder of the order of sisters at the Bar Convent, was only a baby at the time but grew up among courageous Catholic women for whom Margaret was a spiritual hero, and she grew up to found the educational movement that grew into a world wide network of Mary Ward schools such as mine. 

On the train journey up this time, a dog that looked like a pint sized wolf hound, the kind that would be lolling by a medieval fireplace, led us to chatting to the couple across from us on the train. "Do you know the difference between a nun and a sister" asked the wife, when we were discussing travel plans.  I did, not thanks to 15 years of convent education, but due to an Instagram post the week before. She had seen the same one. The former, if you're interested, are enclosed, and live a life mainly in silent contemplation. Hamlet wanted to silence Ophelia's voice, I reflected, and that way madness lies. 

From tales of sisters to handmaids... another Margaret is one of my literary heroes: Margaret Atwood. So when I saw that The Penopliad was being staged that night at the Theatre Royal I booked us in. Last time round it had been Legally Blonde. As we took our seats, we saw on stage several red ropes hanging down. Circus skills would be woven into Penelope's yarn, clearly. And they were, both in the innocence of the maids at the beginning, two actors particularly skilled in aerial, climbing, looping and generally hanging out with the others, relaxing, a stark mirroring to later hanging in twisted positions in a dramatic reveal at the end. 

Penelope walked in initially. A Grecian beauty with grey hair swept up into a Grace Kelly chignon, slender in a white jumpsuit that gave serious goddess vibes. Somewhat familiar, it was only later I twigged I recognised Amelia Bullmore from the BBC series Riot Women. How apt. Here again she was to turn the tables. Penelope told her tale from Hades, a barren space, and her perspective on the Odyssey was not just a retelling of herstory, but that of her maids. Flashbacks took us to her childhood. A rope turned serpentine oracle gave a nebulous prophecy that led to her father trying to drown her initially, leading henceforth to a fear of bridges.  But she survived and was betrothed, her mother, a Naiad, instructing her in the art of fluidity when navigating obstacles. Olivia Burton-Laws, the actor playing the Naiad combined both spoken word and BSL which added a striking grace and power to the choreography and her role in this tale about women making their voices heard. The reference to the river struck me, not only as a shadow of Clitherow, but also because I'm reading Ursula LeGuin's "EarthSea" chronicles, where the river again is a border between mortality and immortality, and cosmic equilibrium. And I am also listening to Elif Shafak's "There Are Rivers in the Sky" on Audible where rivers both source and contain memory. These connections are flooding my stream of consciousness, and writing this is maybe my way to figure out how it all comes together. 

The rest of the all female cast portrayed not only Penelope's maids, and Odysseus' nursemaid, but all of the male characters, bar Telemachus in his infancy, a touching puppet that was a dead ringer for the puppet used in Tao of Glass (See Chapter 243). So much so that I borrowed a programme for a quick flick through, but couldn't see any mention of puppeteers Sarah Wright or her mother Lyndie. I still wonder. In  Tao Phelim McDermott talked about the theatre ghosts we as audience members bring with us, and that still resonated clearly. 

There was dark humour and deftness in the casts' mimicry of male energy, whether the chameleon Odysseus, alternating between tenderness, anger and impassive stoicism, or the suitors' ribald behaviour and poses struck. The latter was often light relief as the story grew ever darker for the maids. Like lambs to the slaughter they because the distraction employed by Penelope to fend off the suitors' unwanted advances. When Odysseus returns, Penelope is given a sleeping draught, while he then orders Telemachus to hang them, so she has no opportunity to explain her strategy, nor they to speak up and defend themselves. In this story, the silence of the mother figure, her complicity in terms of the strategy she employs to survive herself, is what condemns her "children", rather than saves them. Atwood gives the maids the last word though, as in the afterlife they turn to the Furies who grant them their plea to haunt Odysseus, in Hades and in each of his subsequent reincarnations. He will never be free. And Penelope will never be spoken to by them again, left alone to miss the company of her "doves". 

There was something about the production that felt very much a zeitgesit in terms of the history of women in York. Whether Catholic recusants, witches or prophetesses (we also thoroughly enjoyed the jumpscares of the York Dungeons with the likes of Mother Shipton and Isabella Billington) time and again we were coming across tales of maids and strong women, independent, rebellious and defiant, deemed a danger to the status quo. 

Victims of the patriarchy maybe, but not passive ones.  Margaret Clitherow refused to betray those she sheltered, Mary Ward challenged the constraints of religious life for women (she was also imprisoned by the Catholic Church at a time when they preferred their orders of women orderly, enclosed), and Atwood's maids refused to let their story rest with the version told by their masters. Myth or otherwise, the truth of their story lives on, not so much a cautionary tale but more of an empowering one, albeit acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that women can also be complicit in silencing others. We walked back under the light of the full moon and got to our room, slightly disappointed to be assigned to "St Winifred" rather than "St Margaret" opposite. Then we googled the story of the saint and found she was patron of women spurning the unwanted advances of men. Someone up there was having a laugh...


Post-script

The morning after, after regaling Mary Ann with our adventures, my daughter had one more question: "If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be?" Without a moment's hesitation she replied "Prague! It's meant to be the most beautiful city in the world and I would so have liked to have seen it." Ironically, I'm going there next weekend. "I'll send you a postcard" I said. "Are you taking Catherine?" she asked. "God no!" I said. And then, a tad guiltily, I qualified that I was going with an old uni friend Jane to see Cirk La Putyka's 15th anniversary show Okamžik (meaning a moment, an instant) for a weekend getaway that will no doubt go in the blink of an eye. The show is running until mid November and if you can get there, go, it looks phenomenal. We had last seen the company and their production Dolls (see post here) over a decade ago at the Edinburgh Fringe (the only time I have been actually!), the same year Barely Methodical Troupe's show Bromance (see post here) was also at the Circus Hub. BMT's Charlie Wheeller has now taken his iron Cyr ring over to Czech Republic and is in Okamžik too, which is how I heard about the show. Their Christmas show will be FoolMoon. The wheel has come full circle you could say... 

Lead photo credit: Pamela Raith, as featured in Guardian review of The Penopliad: 

www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/oct/17/the-penelopiad-review-margaret-atwood-feminist-york-theatre-royal

PPS: also spotted on a poster at Theatre Royal in the interval that Lost Dog's Juliet and Romeo, which is also on my wishlist, is on tour there 20-21 November. If you fancy a break away you know where to stay. And if you do go up, I also recommend a trip to York Gin, round the corner from The Shambles. Last time I came away  with a Viking inspired Spring notes gin. This time I went for the seasonal "Mad Alice" Blood Orange-infused limited edition. Fun fact: apparently Mad Alice is Europe's number one rated tour guide. If your tastes are more catholic, York Gin also have an apple-infused gin from the orchards at Ampleforth Abbey. Will definitely have to return for an encore...! 

Chapter 266: Itch by Teatronas

"Mum, why are you dressed head to toe in black?"

The answer was simple. It had been a full-on day and I was going to see a show about the fear of death. Somehow shaking off the day, and the clothes, and dressing for the evening ahead, brings its own energy. I was off to see Lithuanian performing arts company Teatronas at Jacksons Lane with ITCH, a performance directed by Gildas Aleksa. Described by its creators as a theatre essay on the fear of death, it draws inspiration from psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom's book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death.

The premise intrigued me. What if our everyday anxieties, our isolation, our busyness, our relentless pressure to achieve, were really manifestations of a deeper fear of mortality? As a compulsive overachiever in a perpetual boom-and-bust cycle of energy, there are patterns that need breaking and questions that need answering.

I've never considered myself particularly afraid of death - educated by Irish Catholic nuns for 13 years, it's really the thought of an afterlife that scares the bejesus out of me! In the past few years I've accompanied both my parents at the end of their lives. The night before my mother died in January, I felt her energy flood the house and wrap me in a warm blanket. The morning after she died, as I approached the bedroom where she lay, my chest constricted, but still I crossed the threshold. The experience struck me with the thought that when we go, no one can do it for us or come through with us. We cross alone. I can't describe why, but that thought gave me some consolation and made me feel stronger.

But there is a fear that remains. A sense of accountability for this life. An exhaustion, even. The feeling that time is slipping away and there is still so much to do, or strip away. Increasingly I feel the pull to pull away. To just be still. But not that evening. I was looking for another perspective.

I arrived minutes before the performance and grabbed a ticket and took a seat. On stage, two guys were warming up in a twilight of muted lighting. Minimal, metropolitan, dressed in suits but bare-chested, with slits of fabric, purple perhaps, at the knees of one and the elbows of the other. I liked that. It was a strange world, somewhere between the familiar and the surreal.

A young woman, the flyer, performer Milda Jonaitytė, swinging on a rope, held a balloon. She spoke of the landmark moment when a child first recognises their own mortality as a helium balloon slips from their grasp and floats away, beyond reach. A first experience of irrevocable loss. It struck a chord, especially if, like me, you were haunted by the beautiful film The Red Balloon as a child. But in a neat inversion, her balloon didn't float away. As she turned upside down, it thudded to the floor. Suddenly we were in an upside-down world. Clever.

Then another balloon, apparently with a life of its own, followed an acrobat across the stage. However often he kicked it away, back it came. Later, a juggler appeared to throw a ball which, through a genius bit of sleight of hand, went nowhere at all. There was something wonderfully playful about these tricks, and something unsettling too. Death is like that balloon, or that ball. However hard we try to chuck it away, or ignore it, it keeps coming back into play.

The circus skills were a joy to watch. Kasparas Bujanauskas performed an extraordinary juggling solo lasting over half an hour. It sounds impossibly long, but the repetition took on an almost meditative, playful quality. There was something deeply soothing about the rhythm, the different patterns, the seemingly effortless control, the endless movement. But baked into that serenity was a certain anxiety about the inevitable drop. There were several. Yet each was recovered so smoothly, with a flick of a toe or a leisurely scoop from the floor, that it was difficult to distinguish the mistakes from the choreography. Nor, perhaps, should we. The carrying on is the point. 

There were moments of wonderful comedy too, with acrobat Džiugas Kunsmanas weaving in and out of the juggler's movements, interrupting his carefully constructed patterns. The interventions were at once a distraction and a source of delight, and I didn't see a drop. There was the pleasure here of watching extraordinary physical skill responding to another human being intervening, Loki-style. 

Then there were surreal moments. At one point, the acrobat folded himself over, feet above his head, until his back seemed to take on a life of its own. It twitched and writhed in strange, almost St Vitus' dance-like movements, the itch of the title, an uncontrollable agitation. It took me back to seeing Punchdrunk's immersive The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre, years ago. But to me the back also resembled a faceless puppet, the hands on either side like ears, a body onto which we could project the features of someone we'd known, or unknown.

The spoken word was harder for me to grasp. The words tumbled out quickly, one over another, and I struggled to hold on to them. I wanted the flyer to slow down, to leave more space between her thoughts, to give me time to reflect. But maybe that was the point, and I just needed to go with the flow rather than try to anchor myself to a pebble in the riverbed of words. A thought had drifted in early on: They're so young. So full of energy. What do they know of death? Of that paralysing exhaustion? And yet I know death doesn't respect age, and neither does grief, as I was reminded when she spoke of her own experiences.

One striking image I carried away was of the flyer standing blindfolded in a two-high, directing the base beneath her through shifts in her weight towards the rope in the centre. It was funny, clever, but also took me back to Songs of the Bulbul, a dance performance I saw earlier this summer, based on a Sufi tale of a caged songbird. When the bird is blinded, it can no longer see the world beyond its cage, but in that darkness its song becomes something deeper, almost a prayer. Its physical world contracts, yet something within it is released.

The creators of ITCH suggest that our relentless rush to achieve might itself be an expression of our fear of death. Watching the endless juggling, the frenetic itch, the distractions, the anxious torrent of words, I could see what they meant. We keep ourselves busy, perhaps because stopping would mean confronting the limits of our time.

In the face of death, perhaps our only response is to create. Not necessarily something grand or lasting. Not a monument to ourselves, or another achievement to add to the list. But something that taps into what lies beyond ourselves, something we can share with others.

Ironically, I almost didn't write this up. I'd jotted these notes down on the tube home. Everyday life intervened the moment I walked back through my front door. Traitors. Ironing. Lesson prep. I dropped the ball and was loath to pick it up. I could just give myself a break for once. But I'm learning. And maybe the trip down to the shell of my parents' house this week for a final clearance, and the raw grief that surged back up, brought that home. 

And perhaps the measure of a life isn't how many balls we managed to keep in the air, but how we pick them up after the drop, before the ultimate performance comes to an end.

Photo credit: Teatronas teatronas.lt/en/itch-show/

And if you are London-based this weekend, check out London Juggling Festival at throwntogether.org which is being covered over at thecircusdiaries.com/

Chapter 265: Mimbre - Weight(less) and the Power of Lift

Flee from despair. That was the gist of a post from a yoga account that started following me on Instagram yesterday. I was feeling a bit despondent. I haven't played the harp for five years, and haven't practised regularly for well over a decade, but I've offered to play at a public event for a girlfriend next week. I'm supposed to be slowing down, and yet there I go again, taking on something outside my comfort zone. Imposter syndrome rears up. "I'm not good enough." Maybe the only answer is indeed to leap on a tube and flee to the other end of the Northern Line.

Which is how I end up back at Jacksons Lane for the second half of its Mixed Doubles evening with Joli Vyann. The evening pairs two very different pieces, both built around what happens when one body has to trust another, and both originally made for outdoor spaces. And here, after the interval, it's Mimbre's Weight(less).

I'm handed a small orange sack tied to a rope and invited to whisper all my worries into it. I leap at the chance. Not so the woman a couple of seats away, who is struggling with hers. Not that she doesn't have worries, but that she'll be overheard. "Couldn't that be your worry?!" another audience member offers helpfully. Possibly that does the trick, along with the assurance that no, there really isn't a hidden microphone in there, it's not that kind of show. She turns her head and whispers her secret into it. I love these sorts of interactions. The magic of make-believe. We all buy into it and so, by common consent, make it so.

On stage, two performers, Silvia and Julia, watch as a third, Rebecca, struggles with an enormous orange sack bound with rope. I'm reminded of the nets of empty plastic water bottles Teatro en Movimiento wore on their heads in their promenade at Ensemble Festival, protesting water contamination. Is this a flotation device? A lifeboat? By the sea, all worries wash away pops into my head. It was written on a piece of driftwood we hung in our cockpit when we were sailing. That's the driftwood of associations that floats around my mind.

Neti, neti. Not that, not that. It is simply an orange sack with a cord, and Rebecca's effort looks Herculean as she staggers around the stage, as though she really is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Silvia and Julia look on with attention and concern and try to help, and a gentle comedy unfolds as the sack rolls from one body to another and each of them ends up underneath it in turn. Then somehow Rebecca is swallowed inside it. Over the course of the piece, the other two help her dismantle the load, revealing smaller orange conical boulders about the size of a large rucksack. They seem to get progressively lighter until one can be balanced in a single hand. The weight becomes less. Weight(less). 

And the orange matters too. It is such a joyful colour, carrying something of creativity and optimism that contrasts with the bulk of the burden. Even before the weight has physically become lighter, the orange stops it from ever looking bleak.

Then there is the sense of lift in the performers themselves. Silvia Fratelli is one of the founding members of Mimbre and has the mischievous assurance of an experienced flyer, Julia Chan the steadiness and strength of a base with a gymnast's fluency, and Rebecca Solomon moves with a dancer's dexterity. But these qualities pass between them, just as the weight does, and the strength belongs to all of them. The base supports, the flyer rises, the middle holds and is held, and then everything changes again.

There are beautiful moments in the shapes they create, whether mirroring each other's movements in inversions or balancing on shoulders and chests in human-pyramid formations. I love the springs, the inversions, the play with shifting weight, whether bodies or sacks. And then there are moments of sheer exhilaration, like the three-high. It is impressive in terms of skill, of course, but what strikes me more about this human tower is the height. I come to watch circus to walk among giants, because in doing so they lift me up in turn. That's what I love about a three-high. The potential and possibility. On my own I go faster, together we go further. And higher.

It also leads into one of the most graceful and inventive dismounts I have ever seen. And then there are moments of holding each other in a group hug where you can feel the audience breathe into the moment with them.

What I love too is the way they look outwards. These aren't acrobats sealed inside a succession of tricks. At one point Julia holds Rebecca in her arms and looks out at us with wry amusement, and we all get it. Each of them has that sense of humour and shares it with us. They're in conversation with the audience. Perhaps that's the outdoor DNA of the piece coming through, the instinct to catch the eye of whoever happens to be there and bring them into the game.

How did it make me feel?

Alive. Joyful. Light-hearted. On our own, we can end up shouldering the weight of the world. When we shoulder each other, we can begin to dismantle it.

And as the load lightens, what happens to our little sacks of worries? The performers draw the ropes onto the stage, open some at random and listen to each in turn, and somehow my own cares, harp and strings attached, feels lighter too. Then all Joli Vyann joins Mimbre on stage and the evening comes together for a final bow. 

As I make my way into the foyer, Kaveh turns and asks me what I thought of the show. My reply is immediate. That is why Lucy Loves Circus.

It makes me smile because Kaveh is the first person I ever met through circus. He led a circus experience afternoon I went to with a dozen girlfriends, and in one photograph I have of us all, there I am at the top of a human pyramid; in another, I'm basing.

Maybe there is something in that. Joli Vyann has explored the trust and shifting balance between two people in a relationship while Mimbre opens that out into something bigger, the strength that comes from a group carrying and supporting one another. I love the skills, of course, but I love the people who make it too. The trust, the support, the conversations afterwards about what we saw, how it made us feel and the stories that brought us there.

And after half an hour watching three women quite literally lift each other up, I float home.

Link to video trailer and further footage: mimbre.co.uk/productions/weightless/

Lead photo credit: Daniel Robinson

Chapter 264: Joli Vyann - Drop Me If You Dare

Back at Jacksons Lane on a Saturday night. Part of me wonders how on earth I dragged myself away from watching Vigil, with a cup of tea and the leftover homemade brownies from the morning's parkrun milestone celebrations. I was tired after three solid hours of harp practice that afternoon, my fingers were blistered, and the sofa was calling. But Jacksons Lane has a double bill tonight: Joli Vyann and Mimbre. Both companies I love, not only for their ridiculous level of skill, but for their social engagement and the way they reach out to others. Walking in, I bump into Kaveh and his wife Jessica, and Kaveh points out that part of what draws me here is everything around the show too - the familiar faces, the conversations that follow, the feeling that we are all invested. Community is the answer.

Joli Vyann is Jan Patzke and Olivia Quayle, and while the name sounds French, it's actually a combination of their names.

I first saw them in Stateless back in 2015, a piece about refugees and migration, and later in 35 Amici Drive with Amici Dance Theatre Company, which brings disabled and non-disabled performers together. I haven't seen much of Joli Vyann in person over the years. I've been away, and when I'm home I'm in London, while much of their work tours outdoors around the country. But I've always felt a connection to them. They have a steady warmth about them, and you feel it in the work too.

One of their earlier pieces, clips of which I'd seen parts of online if not in person, is Lance-moi en l'air (actually French!) and tonight's piece sounds almost like the flip side of Throw Me in the Air: Drop Me If You Dare. Quite a good title for a relationship, really.

They are in their trademark white T-shirts and jeans, everyday clothes that somehow make what follows feel even more like watching a regular couple rather than two circus performers.

Jan begins as a dead weight on the floor. A sack of potatoes. Olivia tries to coax some life out of him. The soundscape is vaguely shamanic, and I wonder if a darker magic is at work. Maybe it's the white chalk on Jan's hands that gives me the hint of zombie. But just for a moment. Olivia steps onto his stomach and gives a gentle bounce, like a human defib. Nothing. Then a little jump. The audience gasps. She crouches low as if preparing for a much bigger leap. We hold our breath. She springs up... and lands neatly to the side of him instead. It makes me laugh. It reminds me of the early years with three young children, when my husband would come home dead from work and I'd be desperate for some adult conversation. Poking him to get some sort of reaction. Anything.

Still nothing.

She lies down next to him, defeated. Well, if you can't beat them... An arm flops over, and she is pulled across to roll onto him, as though his body is half awake. It makes me think of the way two people curl round each other at night, half asleep. Gradually this morphs into an acro duet. There is a kind indulgence in Jan's face and an impishness in Olivia's. The floor work folds into the acrobatics as Olivia climbs and spirals around Jan while he lifts and steadies her. A throw. A lift. A catch. A near miss. A drop, and a body slaps into a roll across the floor. I know it's safe, but there's a brutal edge to it, a dark humour, like slapstick without the cartoon exaggeration. Then Olivia spins Jan round her waist, and this time it's Jan who gets dropped.

Their precision and speed are extraordinary. They throw their whole weight at each other and trust it will be caught, whether in hands catching inversions, feet landing in palms, or a foot balance on a head as Jan moves from seated to standing. It's a dance of trust and experience.

Having been with the same partner for 26 years, I recognise some of this. You know another person's rhythms so well, can pre-empt their next move, act as a counterweight, know how far you can lean. And you need a bit of mischief to keep it alive.

Then the music darkens. Olivia flings herself at Jan and bounces off him. His kind face turns fierce. He puts a hand over Olivia's eyes, then over her mouth, and I flinch. Only days earlier I'd watched footage of a protester being restrained with a hand clamped over her mouth, and I can't unsee it. Here, indoors, in the dark pit of the auditorium, it lands harder than it might in daylight outdoors. The shadows and theatrical lighting add a hint of claustrophobia. 

But then Olivia slips out of the hold and puts her hand over Jan's mouth in turn, and the balance shifts again.That is perhaps what stays with me most. The way control keeps shifting. One moment one of them has the upper hand, then the other does. One carries, then gets carried. One drops, then gets dropped. After 26 years with the same person, that feels kind of familiar too.

Maybe that is why Drop Me If You Dare is such a good title for a relationship. You give someone your weight and trust they won't let you hit the floor. Most of the time.

In a funny kind of way this ended up being date night for me too. My husband wasn't with me, but somehow he was there through it all.

Website: joli-vyann.com

Photo credit: Gabriel Sarkadi

Chapter 263: The Passenger: A record shop, an Odyssey and the boat home

Woolwich Works. Here to see a rehearsal of The Passenger, the latest play by Ade Berry, starring Alex Walton. A sequel to the highly acclaimed From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads, but very much a piece in its own right. One I absolutely loved.

I can’t make the sharing on Saturday night, so I’ve come today instead, simply for the love of it.

This time, I’m taking no chances with the Elizabeth Line and arrive half an hour early, wondering whether the café will be open on a weekday. The place is overflowing. Apparently Louis Theroux is in the house, which takes me back. I once met his father, whose Paddling Around French Polynesia had been my literary guide when sailing through those waters en route from France to Australia.

My mind wanders while I wait for Ade to collect me from reception. Then a call from a headhunter brings me back to reality. Do I apply for the job?

Ade arrives and we head upstairs.

I’ve met Alex a couple of times before and am introduced to Andie Scott, who has designed the costume and set for both shows, as well as many more on the circus circuit. I’m immediately drawn to the record shop on stage. Boxes of albums, covers displayed on a couple of slanting stands on either side, and a chair centre stage. Mine is directly opposite. The idea of sitting bang opposite a performer for a theatrical lap dance makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable, for Alex as much as for me, so I slip off to the side.

And suddenly I’m in a record shop in a satellite town on the outskirts of Northampton. Martin is 27, ten years on from the last play, and stuck on loop. Like a cracked record, he’s in the waiting room of a record shop where life passes him by. Customers come in and go out, but nothing much happens. Legs On Wax is the name of this little outpost, the only quirk in an otherwise rather unremarkable cultural backwater. The shop is the lovechild of an ageing, chain-smoking rocker, the eponymous Legs, who has become a father figure to Martin. A wizened old Scots geezer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music, not just the tracks but the press, and a wicked record collection. When Legs retires back to Scotland, Martin inherits the shop, the records and a treasured Bowie talisman that hangs on the wall. I rather imagine Legs on the Glasgow side of things.

It is testimony to the skill of the actor that immediately the daylight and empty space transforms in my mind’s eye into the low-lit cabaret table set-up it will have on Saturday night, and I’m instantly drawn into his world. Alex captures the gauche enthusiasm of a boy who has yet to become a man, despite his age, while slipping between all the customers who drift in and out of Legs On Wax, swapping accents and mannerisms with astonishing dexterity. He brilliantly captures the various tossers and time wasters who come through the door, each with their own little foibles, and it’s very funny. The dialogue is sharp, too, with nuggets of wisdom passed down by Legs, including the observation, “People who come in browsing are never actually just browsing.” There’s a whole philosophy in that.

And you can feel that same love of music coming from the other side of the stage. Ade’s own encyclopaedic knowledge is everywhere, not in the sense of showing off how much he knows, but in the sheer pleasure of choosing exactly the right song to carry a moment. The records aren’t just scenery and the soundtrack isn’t wallpaper. It ranges from The Doors and The Clash to Bon Jovi, The Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell and Lana Del Rey, and somehow it all belongs in this world. There’s a real sense that the music has been chosen by someone who genuinely loves it, knows it intimately and understands what it can do dramatically. But it’s not just the music. Ade has written a story that manages to be genuinely funny without making Martin’s pain a punchline, and genuinely moving without ever becoming mawkish. The comedy and the grief sit alongside each other, as they do in life.

Martin’s mum wants him to have an adventure. Legs does too. Along with the shop, he’s left him £3,000, but Martin has no clue what to do with it. He has no direction, this boy who has been living in a bubble.

And then the bubble pops.

A phone call from Morag changes everything. I won’t give away the details, but the floor drops away, and a trigger warning for anyone who is grieving. The switch to a funeral in Scotland is stark. Martin stands there, shell-shocked, as the organ’s generic funeral music segues into Stairway to Heaven. It’s a funny conceit, and despite being reminded of that rocker’s crossroads cartoon doing the rounds on Instagram this week, with AC/DC taking the Highway to Heaven and someone else taking the Road to Hell, the reality of the scene made my eyes tear up. It was all very close to home.

There’s something about the way Alex handles this moment that stays with me. He doesn’t need to announce the grief or underline it. It’s there in the stillness, in the shock, in the space between what Martin has been and what he now has to face.

And then the journey begins. Alex jumps on and off the stage, engaging with the audience as he takes us through Martin’s story. The performance is physically alive, constantly shifting, yet never losing sight of the person at its centre. We’re not simply watching a character stumble through a series of adventures. We’re invested in him.

A plastic bag, a book, and a choice of music that I absolutely love. Riders on the Storm. Martin is, quite literally, heading into a new world. The book sets him on a journey to the Chateau Marmont. I’ve read many an article, if not the book itself, about that hotel, its scandals and the debauchery of Hollywood glamour. I find myself wondering about the stories held within its walls, and what Legs might have been up to during those mysterious couple of nights.

There’s something particularly intriguing about the Chateau Marmont as the destination because it isn’t simply some glamorous LA fantasy. It has that strange mythology of a place where people go to disappear for a while, and where the lives being lived behind the doors are rather more complicated than the image presented from outside. Ade’s own experience there, years ago and in the wake of a loss, sits somewhere behind the story, and perhaps that helps explain why the place feels more emotionally charged than simply a famous hotel in Hollywood.

It’s at the other end of the glamour spectrum from the documentary I’ve just seen, Last Guest of the Holloway Motel, which I highly recommend. But the two places have something in common. People escape there with their secrets.

Martin finally has his quest, taking him from the backwaters to the darker waters and seedier side of LA. A picaresque adventure that takes a detour through a strip joint, in a scene so excruciating for Martin that I’m squirming in my seat. Once again, I’m relieved to have moved off to the side.

I won’t say too much more about where the journey takes him, but Martin is truly broken by the adventure. And it is at this point, in desperation, that he calls the record shop, just to hear the answerphone message Legs left behind. That sets me off again. It is so touchingly done, and I’m immediately reminded of the voice note I’ve kept from my Mum on my phone. I’ve only listened to it once since she died in January. But I need her there, close by, and I often have those conversations with her in my head, in much the same way Martin does with Legs throughout the play. Suddenly this isn’t just Martin’s grief I’m watching.

It's when Martin has reached rock bottom that the breakthrough happens. Not in the happy-clappy, hallelujah sense, but in that quieter, more profound inner joy that comes from discovering a strength you didn’t know you had. The philosopher’s stone of any Odyssey. Not the return to the person you were, but the discovery of who you might yet become.

This is why I loved The Passenger. It’s funny, tender, and unexpectedly moving. It takes someone who seems to be going nowhere and sets him on a journey that asks what it means to find your way through grief, and what might be waiting on the other side of it. There’s no neat little bow tied around the whole thing, and none is needed.

Alex Walton is once again a tour de force. He carries Ade’s story through with such precision and generosity that we really care what happens to Martin. His physicality, his comic timing, his ability to inhabit the different characters and then draw us back into Martin’s inner world make the whole thing feel effortless, even though it clearly isn’t. The fact that he can be Martin one second and a completely different customer the next, changing voice, body and mannerism in the blink of an eye, is part of the magic of it. Martin becomes the everyman of our own grief, our own stuckness, and our attempts to find resilience in life. Alex makes that journey feel personal without ever making it sentimental.

At the end, Martin dances in his hotel room at the Chateau Marmont with the ghost of a memory of Legs. They waltz together to Dream a Little Dream of Me, in the Mamas & the Papas version with Cass Elliot singing lead. A romantic song, perhaps, but I don’t see anything homoerotic in their dynamic. It’s more a tender duet, a moment of connection across time and loss. The show has a cracking soundtrack, as you’d expect, and I’m told it will be turned into a Spotify playlist, as the last one was. Naturally, I can’t resist browsing through the albums afterwards.

Ade recommends I take the boat home. It will make the journey twice as long, but I used to commute to the City on the Clipper in the early days of my life before kids, when Xavier and I were living in the Docklands. The moment I step on board, I become a tourist again. Phone out. Selfies. Video WhatsApps to the kids, bringing them along with me on a trip down memory lane. The river has a way of doing that, of making the familiar feel new again.

At one point, a young lad gets on, bubbling with a similar excitement. It's his birthday today, turning 20, the same age as my son. Though he’s of the TikTok generation, complete with a fuzzy microphone and a little camera on his phone, he’s a real pro. He's curious about the notes I'm writing. I tell him about the play I've just seen, about Martin. We start talking and swap stories. As we pass the Cutty Sark, I tell him about my grandfather bringing her over to Greenwich. As we pass HMS Belfast, I tell him about my father, who was her last Captain and lived to 100. 

I listen to my fellow passenger’s stories too, about where he’s going today, where he hopes to go in the future, and the career he’s setting out to build. He’s recording it all as he goes, talking into his little microphone and camera, documenting his own story for TikTok. Off on the next adventure.  I like the synchronicity of it all. From the monologue to the dialogue it opens up.

Here’s to The Passenger, encore. Epic.

Catch the upcoming performances of The Passenger by Ade Berry at these locations:

Woolwich Works, London
Saturday 19 September 2026 at 7:00pm
(Work-in-progress showing at the Ropekeepers Studio)

Proteus Creation Space, Basingstoke
Friday 25 September 2026 at 7:30pm (Preview performance)
Saturday 26 September 2026 at 2:00pm (Preview performance)

Chapter 262: One Fell Swoop - By a Thread

David Monteith-Hodge

 

What can you do with 30 metres of rope?

The first image that springs to mind is a tug of war. Childhood rivalry, school sports day, one side takes a tumble. At National Circus I came to associate rope with an uncompromising aerial discipline. It doesn't really give you a break, like a trapeze bar could, and I found myself in a constant fight with gravity. It was exhausting. Then, after two years sailing to Australia, rope makes me think of life on a boat: coils on deck, lines running through pulleys, the quick exchange of shouted instructions when something needs hauling, lowering or securing. The knowledge that one wrong move can have disastrous consequences. So I was intrigued by the idea of a show built entirely around it, and curious to see what One Fell Swoop would do with it.

I liked the name as well, By a Thread. Well, that's what life feels like at the moment. But this isn't some maudlin reflection on being on the edge. It is much more curious than that.

I had a small preview, in a sense, on the way to the theatre. On the Tube I spotted a dad in a bucket hat and dark glasses, lugging a suitcase and carrying a curly-mopped toddler on his hip. I played peekaboo with the child on the platform and later, when he started crying on the Tube, offered, via his dad, a red-and-white striped juggling ball with a smiley face on. It was accepted so gratefully that I gave him the other two, with their funny expressions, for good measure, and hopped off feeling inexplicably lighter.

I arrived at Jacksons Lane in the nick of time. “Welcome back to Circus, Lu!” was the line thrown to me as I took a seat next to Angus, still reeling after a Bon Jovi concert the night before. I was back where I belong.

The show opens with a familiar piano piece, repetitive and oddly settling. I couldn’t place it at first, then it clicked: Philip Glass - I wrote about Tao of Glass after seeing it twice this summer. Then, from nowhere, a body comes flying across the stage on the rope with a whoop, breaking that spell, and the music gives way to playful strings.

At first the rope is almost modest.Three performers hold it taut while another crosses it like a slackline, their hands constantly adjusting the tension beneath her feet. When she reaches the other side, a hand reaches out to meet hers. Then the rope changes again. It hangs in three sides of a rectangle. A body suspended between the vertical lines becomes a platform. A three-high rises from the floor, and suddenly the flyers are climbing higher, each grabbing a rope before dropping into a catch.

What started as a length of rope quickly becomes something far more inventive: a cloud swing, a bungee, a Spanish web, a Chinese pole, a treadmill balance. Familiar circus disciplines are dismantled and rebuilt around the collective. There is no hidden rigger making the machinery work behind the scenes. We see exactly how it happens. Hands pull the rope down. Bodies counterbalance. Someone has to ground. Someone has to fly.

And the strength this demands is extraordinary. It isn't just the person in the air doing the spectacular bit. The people basing are working just as hard, hauling, holding and controlling the rope while someone else climbs, swings or flies. I kept thinking, surely they must be doing twice the work? And then they did it again. These guys are virtuosos on the strings.

“Basing. Flying. Hup.” The show has its own physical grammar, built from things that sound deceptively simple: hold, pull, climb, catch. And the performers clearly know which job they'd rather be doing. Nobody wants to be the one still hauling the rope, doing the grunt work.

“Climbing, basing, yup, coming down. Hurry up Latonya. Ah, not yet. Ugh. Still basing.”

I loved the cheeky competitive one-upmanship as they bring each other down in order to clamber up themselves, and the way they gradually emerge as characters as they call each other by name. Ellie’s bounce, Easa's glorious sulk, particularly after his declaration on rope “I am beautiful”, strutting around, a leisurely examination of his nails while everyone else is flailing and needing his help, made me laugh. A neck hang produces the immediate response, “That doesn't look very safe,” before a squabble ends with one performer accidentally swept up in a foot hang like a sprung trap.

Photo: Moving Platform Photography

Then the mood changes.

Charice comes out of the wings hauling straps behind her, attached to the rope  as though dragging some invisible weight. The music turns dissonant. The playful rhythm disappears and suddenly there is an urgency to the pulling. The strain is visible. The effort is palpable. The straps become an extension of the rope, and the pulling segues into the most effortless, beautiful flight.

Photo: Ambrose Kelso

Later, Radiohead's Spectre accompanies a haunting solo. Easa climbs the rope with something almost painful in the movement, hauling himself upwards until he reaches the end of his tether. Another performer appears and the solo quietly becomes a duet, the two bodies beginning to mirror each other.

And then the rope becomes almost childlike again.

It turns into a giant cat's cradle in the background. They skip with it. They make knots. They swing from it, climb it and disappear into it. There is something of the playground energy in the way they keep testing what it will allow them to do, except the playground is six metres in the air and nobody has forgotten the physics.

That is where the show is at its most beguiling. The danger is real. There is no safety wrist loop to secure Jonathan at the top of the rope as he is spun round in Spanish web. But so is the play. The performers clearly know exactly what they are doing. There is something magical about watching a body suddenly appear somewhere you weren't expecting a body to be.

There is a later duet between Jonathan and Charice, the founders and creators of the show. I was completely taken in by the tenderness between them, to the point that the romantic in me found myself checking afterwards, “Please tell me they are a couple,” as though I would have been cheated if they weren't.

Photo: Sean Breadsell

They are. And that deep and steady partnership has shaped the whole show.

Other points I loved were the application of chalk on the chest as a precursor to Nina balancing there rather than on Cassia's shoulders, and the final act, in which the theme is brought home as all the cast are inverted and the rope is passed from foot to foot in a line. Not everyone has grown up on their hands, as Ellie appears to have done, and so there are moments when the rope is dropped. But that only seems to create more camaraderie and goodwill from the audience. Someone slips. Someone else catches them. We've got you. They all end up connected. 

Photo: Ambrose Kelso

I was delighted to learn afterwards that Jonathan had grown up sailing, and that they bought the rope with Charice from a shipbuilder's yard, then borrowed a couple of pulleys from the circus school in Melbourne and began experimenting. Jonathan's background in rigging and engineering makes sense of the show's extraordinary balance between physics and poetry. I love that it has grown organically from those first experiments over the past nine years. And that they regularly play board games all together on tour as well. A staple of family life and our ocean crossings on La Cigale, along with the “peg game” introduced by a Kiwi sailing friend. Great to find that's a shared language too.

Suddenly the rope made sense to me in another way.

On a boat, rope is never simply rope. It is an extension of the crew. It runs through your hands and connects you to something happening somewhere else. Pull here and something moves there. Ease the tension and the whole system changes. You learn the names of the lines, the knots, the pulleys, but what matters most is knowing when to hold and when to let go. And that camaraderie pulls you into the game.

Watching By a Thread, I realised I had been watching something I already knew without quite recognising it. The language was different, but the principle was the same. Seven people working a system in which every movement depends on somebody else's movement.

And perhaps that is why the show stayed with me. It doesn't need to tell us that we need one another, to depend on, to have fun with. We can see it.

Every time somebody flies, somebody else is holding the rope.

Photo: David Monteith-Hodge

Post-script: 

Before the show started, there was an announcement that photography with flash was permitted. But words are my thing.

Only sometimes I drop the thread, and words let me down. Especially when caught off guard for a post-show audience soundbite.

I nearly died when I saw it published, and me first up. “Creative, joyful and sexy” were the three words with which I enthusiastically used in the vox pop for One Fell Swoop on Jacksons Lane reel. 

Sexy?! What was I thinking?! 

There is something very different about saying a word spontaneously into a microphone and then seeing yourself first up on a reel broadcast publicly on a theatre's Instagram and Facebook page. On reflection, I felt my choice of “sexy” could make me sound like some sort of overexcited circus voyeur, rather than convey the camaraderie and sheer joy of being alive in the show that I intended. But maybe I'm overthinking it. Wouldn't be the first time!

Still, just to be clear, I wasn't talking about sexy in the Sydney Sweeney sense. I mean the cheeky way One Fell Swoop engage with the audience, and each other, and that physical connection conveyed through insane strength, ridiculous skill, tenderness and playful energy.

The Tao of Rope. The Shibari of Intimacy. 

That's what makes it sexy. And it was joyful. And creative. So, fair cop. I stand by my words.

Photo: David Monteith-Hodge

  

Directors: Charice Rust and Jonathan Morgan

Dramaturg: Zebastian Hunter

Cast: Cassia Jamieson, Charice Rust, Easa Min-Swe, Ellie Grow, Jonathan Morgan, Latonya Wiggington, Nina Robertson

Technician: And a special shout-out to Winter Chapman, whose circus background, musicianship and technical ear bring the sound and lighting together in a way I found particularly striking. I loved meeting her and hearing how she brings those worlds together.

Chapter 261: Zirkus Morsa's Amber Hour

A head topped with a shock of bleached hair pops out from behind the curtain, in profile. Then another head appears. I'm reminded of the photograph in my previous post, and smile at the irony that I've brought the clown from that shot to watch this performance too. The image has something of Beckett about it. Discombobulated comedy. Two heads appearing from nowhere, already suggesting that we have entered a world in which the rules are not quite the ones we know.

But this isn't a clowning show per se, though I imagined there would elements, as the show is directed by Kook Ensemble's Sean Kempton and Michaela O'Connor. It is a touching exploration of love and connection, set in a kind of no-man's-land outside ordinary time. Welcome to the world of Zirkus Morsa, the vision of  Rosa Wilm and Johannes Siven.

Their half-hour of Amber Hour, a 70-minute show in development and the last sharing in Jacksons Lane's Summer of Circus Hub, blew me away. It was physical poetry, but of a very different kind from the lyricism of the spoken and sung word in Circus Parade the week before. Where that show used language to tell its stories, Amber Hour seemed to tell its stories through bodies, objects, projections and the strange physical logic of circus.

I knew technology was going to play a part when I walked into the auditorium and saw a back row of tables crowded with electronics and switches, already being manned. The cinematic quality of the show was there from the beginning.

The backdrop was a projection of images that transitioned the scenes between street and home. On either side of the stage were two enormous perspex boxes, transparent but somehow mysterious, each carrying with it the promise of illusion. They became little worlds of their own, or perhaps portals into one.

In one, a phone rings. Eventually it is answered, but the man has the wrong phone box. He wants to get to another phone box, only to discover a huge queue, with a bouncer at the front acting as guardian to the underground scene, or the underworld, whatever lies beyond.

The whole scene has the slapstick manoeuvring of Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, as the man tries to get to the front, but there is something much darker underneath it. I later discovered that there is potentially an Orpheus narrative running through Amber Hour, and suddenly the queue begins to feel almost purgatorial. Though Hadestown this ain't.

The boxes change function.

In another scene, a woman strips off her top and enters the box with her partner. There is a voyeuristic element, for sure, but not in the Amsterdam sense, nor The Box. The top underneath is a sports bra, and what follows is instead something intimate and strange. She uses her body to wedge herself upside down from the ceiling, while her partner moves in for a kiss. At the last moment she ducks her head away, twisting the physical mechanics of the duet into a tiny comic tragedy of desire.

Elsewhere the box becomes a nightclub. All the performers squish inside, faces pressed against the glass, one particularly caught in a ridiculous grimace, while the music pumps and the party rages. It is New Year's Eve. A couple leave. She says goodbye and he goes back in.

Relationships in Amber Hour are constantly forming, dissolving and reforming, often with a lovely casualness. I particularly loved a series of two-high sequences in which partners were swapped almost en passant, the acrobatic equivalent of changing seats at a dinner party, or a crowd at rush hour navigating the spaces in between.

There is also a beautiful moment in which a performer plays with her own shadow self, apparently a pre-recorded projection. It is one of those images that feels almost magical precisely because the technology is so seamlessly incorporated into the physical world.

And then there are the recurring lovers.

A pair sit together on a chair and it is only when they stand that we register the extraordinary physical discrepancy between them. A good fifteen inches, as it turns out, which I believe is the name of their act outside of this. The comedy comes not from a punchline but from the simple fact of two bodies that don't quite seem to belong together, finding a way, through acro duo, to do so anyway.

Later, there is a duet on rola-bola, with a couple of glasses placed on it for good measure. Because apparently balancing two human beings on a rolling board isn't quite enough.

And perhaps that is what stayed with me. The circus skills are extraordinary, but everything is in service of this strange, funny, fragile world in which people keep trying to find each other. Bodies don't quite match but they do fit. Phones don't connect. People end up in the wrong places. Shadows acquire lives of their own. Lovers swap partners, disappear into boxes and emerge somewhere else.

The world loops back on itself, just as memory does.

There is something wonderfully Beckettian about that, but Amber Hour is much warmer than Beckett. Its absurdity is shot through with affection. Its characters are ridiculous at times, vulnerable at others, and circus gives them a language for all the things they can't quite say.

I came out on a high, in part because I'd just been able to share with a complete stranger the reason why Lucy Loves Circus, without needing to say a word.

This was such a good advert for where contemporary circus can go when it stops thinking of itself as a succession of tricks and starts borrowing freely from cinema, theatre, dance, magic and visual art. Amber Hour felt less like watching a circus show than being briefly admitted into somebody else's strange dream.

And perhaps that is the amber of it: moments, memories and relationships caught and held in suspension, like an insect preserved in amber. The world of Amber Hour loops back on itself, outside ordinary time, and I wanted to remain suspended there too.

Photo credits: Zirkus Morsa

Original Concept: Rosa Wilm and Johannes Siven

Directing: Michaela O’Connor and Sean Kempton

Performers: Tuk Frederiksen, Christopher Schlunk, Iris Pelz, Gisle Henriet, Raphaël Perrenoud, Moritz Böhm, Rosa Wilm, Johannes Siven, Chloé Lacire

Set Design: Benjamin Lebreton

Sound Design: Peter Buffery

Lighting Design: Pascale Laajili

Costume Design: Anne Blanchard 

Illusion Consultant: Guiseppe Sodano