LE GRAND CIRQUE, presented by QPAC in association with TML Enterprises at the Lyric Theatre, 8 - 24 January 2010. Director, Alan Harding; lighting, Pete Kramer; musical arrangements, Evan Jolly and David Fitzgerald.
Comparisons are odious, so I'm not going to say that Le Grand Cirque is like Cirque de Soleil crossed with a Diaghilev ballet although, as I just did, that's one way to describe it. But it's also quite different from either and is, in my book, the most beautiful circus performance I've ever seen.
It's very difficult to work out from the publicity material just what the company is, and my internet search yielded only that it's an international company based in the US, made up of over 50 world champion acrobats, and that it features acts from Brazil, Canada, Russia, Mongolia, Europe and China.
Without a program, I couldn't tell you the names of these astonishing performers, but I did manage to ascertain the name of the person who in my book is the star of the show, the lighting designer. He's called Pete Kramer, and never have I seen a show so brilliantly lit. I could have sat all night just watching the atmosphere change from ominous to joyous, from terrifying to simply thrilling, because it's a work of art in itself, transforming the few basic circus props into an other-worldly landscape.
The show demands a shift in our expectations, because the acrobats, who are mostly from China and Mongolia, don't all have that sinewy leggy beauty that we are used to in European circuses. Some of the women, in particular, are quite stubby, but when they do an acrobatic version of Swan Lake, and one of the women balances en pointe on her male co-star's head, it was one of those show-stopping moments.
But every act was a show-stopper in its own way. There were no dead spots, except perhaps for the six European chorus girls who dressed up real pretty just like Miz Scarlett and pirouetted a bit, but had no acrobatic talent and were just there as window dressing. Every act was a masterpiece, and when the six young Central Asian boys did that standard act of tumbling through a series of rings balanced on top of each other (if there's a technical name, I don't know it), sometimes five of them, it was given an added twist. One of them, who was obviously the star, tried three times to jump through the top ring but kept knocking it to the ground, building up the tension so that when he did finally make it, the audience was on its collective feet, roaring at him to succeed. A great way of increasing tension and getting an audience on side, although I learned from one of the ushers that this is actually part of the act, and that he does it deliberately every night. A great theatrical trick, though.
But there was no difficulty in getting the audience on side, anyway, because that had all been done from the very beginning by the clown Salvador Salangsang, not a red-nosed floppy-slippered character, but a gaunt man who worked the audience from well before the lights went down, and had people in the first two rows losing all their inhibitions and following his voiceless instructions to the letter, while the rest of, glad that we weren't in the same situation, fell about laughing, which we could do with impunity as he wasn't humiliating his victims in the way that a famous Australian cross-dressing super-star has made her own.
I won't go through all the acts in detail, except to say that they were performed at an astonishing high level, and the costumes were surreal rather than being grotesquely provocative - although I was glad to see that most of the male acrobats performed bare-chested. We gels need our little thrills, too.
They've done their bit and gone to cheer up the lives of audiences in some other part of the world now, so you'll never know what you missed, but they're one company that I'm going to keep on my list, and I'd follow them all over the world if I could afford it. It was the best night of the year so far, and it's going to be hard to match. Alison Cotes