Chapter 51: La Soirée

Pushing along a buggy a few years ago and struggling for breath, metaphorically-speaking, I stopped in front of a bus stop in Balham.  There, resplendent, was a poster advertising the circus coming to town. La Soirée.  The name conjured up exotic allure, the sepia tones in the picture, maybe a memory overlay, promised sultry fun. Just out of my reach, still I took a picture of it and sent it to a friend. This is right up your street, I said. Saw it last year at the Roundhouse, came the reply. Go! You'd love it! And so I did ... last night.  

La Soirée is now in the big top Spiegeltent on South Bank. Spiegel means play, right? So a play-space then, home to a mash-up of circus and cabaret acts. And come Friday night, boy, were we ready for that. And the South Bank was ready for us. The Christmas market was open and everyone was in festive mode. Mulled wine and wienerschnitzel, pints of beer and hog roast, jam-packed wooden walk-ways and fairy-lights leading like a latter-day yellow brick road all the way to the glittering Spiegeltent. Magical.

There was a bar inside the tent where we topped up with mulled wine, and then were guided to our seats by an über-charming prohibition-styled usher who also carried my booze for me, having astutely assessed the risk potential presented by my heels, the scalding drinks and the grooves in the floor. There were rows of free-seating, as ever, with a few tables dotted around, and booths at the back. The evening itself veered between moments that were laugh out loud funny, touching and simply astonishing. I was delighted to find that my man, who can be so blasé, was completely enthralled from the first to the last. I can't tell you why exactly - they don't hand out the programme until after the show for good reason - but I am itching to tell you something without giving the game away. So I've answered this conundrum with a puzzle. Below are the initials of the performers we saw. You can make sense of them if you know the show, and if you don't, hopefully you'll get the flavour, and a taste for more.

Go! You'd love it! And if you ask nicely, I'll come again with you ...

tEG: Bowlered these maidens over, gentlemen. Ripped reality. Wow.

JL:  Buckets of pizzazz and cheek, gallons of skill.

MMmmm: You deserve your own confetti, love. 

JB: Flexing more than just our laughter muscles. Geek love. 

HM: Sex on a stick, so smooth, left us feeling good. 

AT: Uncorked mellifluousness and forked tongue slayde us. A novel bedtime story...

SS&ADC: Soaring, smouldering, sexy, spell-binding and utterly compelling.  

D&F: Hypnotising routine. Science can explain how they do it, but still lost in wonder.

StBB: Fame precedes tail, one sexy bunny. 

UM: De putamadre, de verdad, mujer con cojones, agua sin gas y dos cervezas por favor.

PPC: Cohen's Clown. I will always look up to you. Hallelujah!

La Soirée is showing until 11th January, 2015.

Chapter 48: Barnum the Musical, encore!

Come Follow the Band

"Staying home living day by day, may be safe but it can't be duller,

Seeing things only black and grey, when the world is alive with colour.

Doing just what your neighbours do, maybe wise but it ain't so clever.
Every man has a dream or two. Let 'em go and they're gone forever."

Barnum, "Out There"

I was toying with the idea of giving up the blog last week. Juggling family life while carving out this circus space feels like a precarious balancing act at times. So I took myself off to a friend's couch. A friend who has multiple children, trains at Circus Space and guides people for a living, albeit around London. Someone who I could count on to understand, and, crucially, to talk me out of it. I'm clever like that. And that's what she did, with words of wisdom worthy of circus impresario Phineas Taylor Barnum himself.

I love the idea of a Barnum and Bailey Circus and the whole Big Top scene.  What's the attraction? The glamour. The razzle-dazzle. The sexiness. The laughter. The jaw-dropping feats that make you gasp in awe "That's impossible!" or "I could never do that!" and then, in my case, comes the siren call of that still, small voice inside piping up "but I'd like to give it a go...". The Big Top for me represents a space to think big and go for it. 

Funnily enough though, I never went to the circus as a child. One of my older siblings had once been so scared by clowns that by the time I came along, number six, my mother had sworn never again. Maybe that forbidden fruit of clowning is why I am so partial to a spot of it myself. Anyway, one day, back in the 80s, BBC1 screened the musical "Barnum" starring Michael Crawford, showman and stunt-meister par excellence, and I was immediately captivated, from the very first catapault.

The musical tells of Barnum's life with his beloved wife Charity, a patchwork of honest browns, taupes and gentle tones who both contrasts and ultimately complements his own glitzy, vibrant brand of humbug. The show charts Barnum's career moving from the world of exhibiting curiosities in museums to going on tour, the acts he picks up, including the beautiful Swedish Nightingale, who he really picks up (and then drops again), to Barnum's mind-numbing stint in a clock factory at his wife's behest, his foray into politics and his eventual return home to all things circus, with his pal Mr Bailey.

We saw the show twice last year at the beginning and end of the run at Chichester Festival Theatre, which I presume was producer Cameron Macintosh's trial run for a West End transfer, and now this year on tour at the New Wimbledon Theatre. Each time the children have enjoyed the music, the colour and the spectacle, but essentially we have seen three very different shows.   

Trailer for Barnum at Chichester Festival Theatre:

The first time round Chichester Festival Theatre was being revamped and we saw the production in a temporary construction that from the outside looked like a big top tent. Perfect.  There was a slated, wooden walkway with lights leading up to it and a variety of stands outside selling old-fashioned humbugs (the mint kind) and other transports of delight.  It was summer and there was very much a festival atmosphere. In the performance itself there were fire-eaters, tumblers, acrobats on silks, jugglers, and my favourite, the aerialists spinning umbrellas over the waltzing lovers (see trailer). It was simply enchanting. It happened to be press-night as well, and it was evident that the poe-faced critics sitting in the row in-front were not going to be huge fans. The lead, Christopher Fitzgerald had obviously been giving it his all in the run-up and had lost his voice, and he didn't make it across the tightrope. However that disappointment just made his Barnum all the more fallible, and we rooted for him. His is the Barnum who makes mistakes and picks himself up, he is the grafter on the make, the cheeky chappy, the fighter with chutzpah. And that's why we went back at the end of the run. In the second show we saw, same location, the songs had been cut, along with some of the circus performance sequences and it was altogether more streamlined. Christopher Fitzgerald was on fire and triumphed on the tightrope. How we cheered. 

We needed cheering up ourselves the third time round. My husband was unable to join the kids and I at the last minute. Still, we knew the score - quite literally, actually, as the kids know every song backwards - and the moment we stepped over the threshold to the theatre, the show worked its charm. 

Cutting it fine as ever, as we ran down the stairs to the stalls we crossed paths with circus performers coming up.  They instantly engaged with the children, making jokes, throwing them balls, and a cute aside in my direction was an instant pick-me-up. We were laughing all the way to our seats. When we got there the fun and games continued. One juggler had my son throwing clubs, the girls got my daughter involved in a hoop trick that very nearly worked, together with ribbon twirling. "Honey, we need to get you into a costume" they told her, and my daughter's face just beamed. Priceless. 

The production in Wimbledon had a much smaller performance space than in Chichester, and the circus skills showcased were condensed, but the interaction beforehand really drew the audience in. The kids loved the staging of the Tiny Tom Thumb, peeking out from an oversized armchair, dancing among the towering Bearskin Guards on stilts, and the marvellous Jumbo the Elephant, all legs and a trunk, which this time round squirted water at the audience. For me, music is at the heart of the show and the live band, walking among the audience at the beginning of the second half, was a joy. Brian Conley in the lead was a consummate entertainer and a credible, confident Barnum, not a step out of place. His experienced Barnum has been through life, and is resigned to the knocks he's had along the way. His wife, Charity Barnum, was simply lovely, and a surreptitious wave to the kids at the end in the final bow meant they were floating on air the whole way home. Magic. Again. Encore! 

Chapter 47: Circus skills are good for the kids - scout's honour!

I love a cheeky pun, so the page 3 headline in the newspaper was always going to catch my eye. Only we're talking The Times, not The Sun. 

"Were you ever a Scout? I'm a frayed knot"

Well, boom, boom! I read on. The article registered outrage among certain quarters about the decline of traditional "relevant" skills like knot-tying in the scouts association, and by extension the girl guides, in favour of new activity skills badges "covering areas such as youth work, circus skills [...] and street sports such as skateboarding". Children's author GP Taylor declared: "This just shows what a pathetic society we are becoming. Baden-Powell will be spinning in his grave. He would be outraged by this."

While I agree there is often pathos involved in clowning around, it's surely wrong to write off circus skills, and the like, as pathetic. The circus skills I've come across require courage, trust, focus and hard graft, and you even learn how to tie knots (with your feet, on the rope, if you're lucky!). They also require physical stamina, core strength, and, dare I say it, mindfulness, something that competitive team sports at school don't really develop. 

Then, that evening I stumbled across one of the most engaging and inspirational TED talkers it's ever been my joy to watch. The talk was given by tightrope legend Philippe Petit, subject of the Oscar-winning documentary "Man on a Wire", and had been shared by Airborne Circus the same evening that Nik Wallenda was crossing blindfolded between towers in Chicago, buffeted by winds of up to 25 m.p.h.

As Petit was describing his adventurous childhood he struck me as a regular Boys' Own hero, encapsulating the spirit of Baden-Powell's own rhetoric: “Where is there a boy to whom the call of the wild and the open road does not appeal?"  Petit progressed from magic tricks aged 6, to juggling and then to the high wire as a teen, thanks to an enterprising, curious spirit.  And it is this coupling of common-sense and ingenuity that is be the badge of honour of any true scout.  You should hear for yourself how he constructed his very first tightrope:

Baden-Powell considered that fun and games had an intrinsic moral value to them, and I am sure from that stand-point as well he would thoroughly appreciate the final story in the TED talk, where Petit describes how the stringing a tightrope between Israel and Palestine built a bridge in more ways than one. 

So if Baden-Powell really is "spinning" I'm sure he's just showing off a few new-found circus tricks beyond the grave. Heaven, really. 

Chapter 46: Trick or treat?!

So let me tell you about last night. It was Halloween. While a couple of glasses of red wine touched lips in the hall, I donned a mask and slid into the night on the arm of a gentleman in a black velvet frock coat and silk satin shirt. The entertainment that followed involved a naked torso, a number of threesomes and plenty of whip-cracking. Eyes Wide Shut yet?! Welcome to my world. Trick or treating with the family, then an evening at the Moscow State Circus on Clapham Common. That's how we roll in Nappy Valley. 

We arrived at Clapham Common to find friends waiting at the entrance. The children raced around together in sheer joy and delight at the sight of the colourful circus tent, only stopping for popcorn, thankfully the salted variety after the sugar rush that is trick or treat. The doors opened and we flooded in to the two-tiered unreserved seating area, the majority being red plastic chairs, with a few rows in front of velvet-cushioned seats. I imagined the latter being filled back in the day with Kremlin officials and their families. You see, maybe it's the name "Moscow State Circus" but there is a sense of walking into some sort of socialist time warp (it's just a jump to the left...) back in the 80s. Maybe it's the bombastic music, the costumes, the lighting, the roller-skates ... even the audience clapping at the end is orchestrated by the performers to keep a steady beat so that no specific act is singled out by particularly fervent applause. We are all in this together, comrades.  

In the centre of the ring was a rather kitsch Venus de Milo statue. A replica from the real "Gorky Park" - also the name of the show - maybe? The show title brought to mind that 80s phenomena The Scorpions who sang "I follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change".  The song celebrated the tide turning with the fall of the Berlin Wall (25th anniversary in November, guys), and the period of Glasnost and Perestroika that it heralded it. It was a big hit in Germany for sure. I know this because I was on a exchange trip there at the time, and the memory of a fortnight of teenagers earnestly singing about "the children of tomorrow" still haunts me. Still, I wondered at the statue's function, other than ornamental, until in stumbled a man with a plank, in a stripey top and a beret. Within seconds he had toppled the statue and was trying to piece it back together, this king of slapstick, Monsieur Val Defun, ouch la la! My son nudged me, delighted "I think we've found our clown, Mum." 

The first serious act was handstands. Now, the description "handstands" really wouldn't sell it to me.  But luckily the audience is invited to take (and share on social media) photos.  So I did. Here you go - gratuitous shot of a naked torso.  Only it's not gratuitous, not really. I took the picture out of pure (as the driven snow, honest guv) admiration for sheer strength and poise. I still cannot quite believe how long he held the positions. My son kept nudging me "Wow, just wow, Mum, can you believe this?"   And that was pretty much what happened the whole way through the show - we were open-mouthed in wonder at the skill and stamina of the performers.  There were the the jugglers tossing balls every which way, even from upside down on a pole, a dream of red satin gracing the air on a neck-loop, a scantily-clad triumvirate spinning on an aerial wheel, dizzying hula-hooping, soaring sommersaults through the air and captivating catches on trapeze, ("don't try that at home, will you Mum?!"), all set to anthems that if they weren't straight out of James Bond, like Live and Let Die, surely should be. The kids loved the Kozak whip-crackers, especially as the act subverted their expectation, as initially presented, that the man was in charge and the women was just his sidekick, and, when her skirt was whipped off, Mummy here thought it was a moment of pure Bucks Fizz Eurovision. The kids had to watch through their hands the "acrobatic soldiers"tumble off the Russian swing, while for me it was the roller-skating threesome doing staggeringly speedy tricks on a tiny platform.

The children's all-time favourite part of the show, though, was watching one of their own perform - a boy, earlier in the evening "picked" from the crowd, who at the end was dressed as a mini-me Defun, speeding round on a unicycle and whipping up the audience. The cast isn't huge by any standard, which made the variety and scope of their acts all the more impressive, and I felt rather gutted for these astonishing performers giving it their all, second show of the evening, to a half-full auditorium. Maybe it's because it's Halloween, but I for one was haunted by the empty seats. Then again, the programme was out-of-date, selling at only a couple of quid (reduced from £5) as they've run out of the current edition. That made me laugh. Looks like demand does outstrip supply after all. Good luck to them. 

Happy Families at the Moscow State Circus