Review: GIFFORDS CIRCUS: WATERFIELD, Chiswick House & Gardens
Same gold, same gold: the village green circus is back to its best form
There is a moment, somewhere between the knife-thrower's insane grin and Brian the Goose making his entrance with the unruffled authority of a minor aristocrat, when you simply have to give in to the magic. Giffords Circus has this effect on people. It has had this effect on people for twenty-six years, and Waterfield — this season's new production, themed around the riverbanks and hedgerows of an England that exists mainly in children's literature — gives absolutely no indication that the spell is about to wear off.
The formula is, by now, well-established. Cal McCrystal returns for another year as director, takis again provides the designs, James Keay the music, and the Cotswold countryside furnishes the backdrop for a tent that feels, from the moment you arrive among the hand-painted burgundy wagons and catch the first whiff of candyfloss, like a place that has quietly decided the twenty-first century can wait.
Waterfield draws on Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter for its character roster (Ratty, Mole, Squirrel Nutkin, the wily Mr Fox) and McCrystal deploys this with the ease of a director who knows exactly how much narrative a circus needs, which is: enough to hang the concept and costumes on, and not a stitch more.
That year-on-year consistency is hard-won. When Nell Gifford died in December 2019 at 46 (the animating spirit behind everything Giffords stood for and the woman who had built it from nothing alongside her husband Toti in 2000), it was far from obvious that the circus could survive the loss. She had constructed it out of a conviction that the English village green deserved its own form of theatre and that theatre deserved to be genuinely dangerous once in a while. She wrote about circus life, published four books, and drew around her a company of performers and creatives who shared her particular brand of idealism.
Her niece Lil Rice stepped into the producer's role and, together with her family has admirably kept this company alive There were seasons that felt the weight of transition more than others. Waterfield does not. This is Giffords at full confidence: an institution that has processed its grief and got on with being extraordinary.
Animals remain central to the Giffords contract with its audience, and rightly so. Nell built the circus on horses, and the two that appear in Waterfield (Maisie and Otto) carry with them something no amount of aerial rigging can replicate: the particular electricity of a large, living creature sharing a small space with an audience of wide-eyed kids and nostalgic parents. Brian the Goose waddles on with the timing of a comedian who has been doing this long enough to know that understatement is everything.
The human company is equally good. Clowns Olivia Louise Swoboda-Weinstein and Stefan Swoboda anchor the show as Ratty and Mole with considerable charm and are a country mile above their Cirque du Soleil counterparts. The Los Rivelinos duo provide broad physical comedy between the more aerobic acts, and their buffoonery keeps the energy from flagging during the transitions.Raf Shah's Weasel makes a satisfyingly villainous ringmaster figure whose interactions with the clowns are at the heart of the comic storyline.
The Italian Jasters (Giacomo Sterza and Elena Busnelli as Mr Fox and Sally Henny Penny) build up and up their knife-throwing and crossbow act with the measured sadism of performers who know exactly how long to make you wait. Their daughter Jessyka Jasters (Jessica Sterza), performing as Squirrel Nutkin, delivers a foot-juggling routine of hypnotic precision. Her partner Sonny Caveagna's Rodney Rabbit is charming enough, though his juggling act outstays its welcome by a good few minutes: following a routine with one set of hoops for another using hoops of a different colour is not, it turns out, an appealing move. We all have places to be, Rodney.
Then there are the standouts. The Cienna Sisters (Sydney Carrera Wilson and Cassidy Grace Vallin) blend contortion and duo aerial strap into something that feels less like a circus act than its own art form: slow, precise, genuinely beautiful, and of a technical standard that would not embarrass a contemporary dance programme. And the nine-strong Ethiopian Addis Ababa Troupe, performing as the Newts, build their acrobatic pyramids and hand-vaulting sequences with a collective energy that produces the kind of focused silence in a tent that directors of straight theatre spend entire careers failing to manufacture.
The piece de résistance is always going to be the Valencia Flyers. Miguel Angel Hernandez Diaz and Carlos Mayorga Macias perform the Wheel of Death (two enormous hamster wheels on which, and inside which, and improbably above which, they run, skip and blindfold themselves at speeds that make rational risk-assessment feel briefly beside the point). The skipping rope sequence alone is worth the ticket price, the drive, and whatever babysitting arrangements were required to get here.
Singer Jenna Dearness-Dark, presiding over the Grasshoppers band under James Keay's musical direction, ranges from English folk to Led Zeppelin and transcends genre with ease. Tweedy the Clown, meanwhile, who departed last year to launch his own touring show, is not missed. That is perhaps the greatest possible tribute to a company that has never needed any single performer to carry it.
Giffords Circus continues at Chiswick House and Gardens until 7 June before continuing on tour until 27 September.
Photo credits: Giffords Circus
Reader Reviews
Videos
