Review: THE LADYBOYS OF BANGKOK: FULL MOON, Sabai Pavilion
Twenty-eight years, one pink tent, and still no actual circus. But it's outlasted everything on Shaftesbury Avenue except Les Mis
Twenty-eight years ago, The Ladyboys of Bangkok made a brief appearance at what was then the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue (now the Sondheim, which has committed itself to Les Misérables with a fervour that makes Swifties look fickle). Now the company has finally brought its full touring operation to London. The Sabai Pavilion — a vast pink tent pitched on Shepherd's Bush Green, fragrant with pad thai and ambition — houses what the company bills as its official London debut: a two-hour kathoey cabaret revue now in its twenty-sixth year of nine-month UK tours.
It arrives, as it happens, at the same moment that Giffords Circus (another British tent show with a comparable claim on the national calendar) is navigating its own generational handover. Two family enterprises, two iconic pavilions, two founders recently lost. The crossroads could hardly be more neatly timed.
This year's theme is Full Moon, notionally a Thai beach party derailed when an eccentric magician's grand escapology illusion goes wrong. In practice, the narrative is looser than a drunken sailor’s tongue. All you really need to know is that someone is tied up in a sack and then appears sporadically throughout, skedaddling across the stage at irregular intervals. That’s right: a running bag is the night's running gag. Applause all round.
The company's marketing doth protest too much that Full Moon is "not simply a party." It is simply a party, albeit with rockets attached. Once the tent fills up with an eager audience, there is an undeniably life-affirming vibe that no snarky theatre criticism can puncture. There are endless disco numbers that make the tent bounce, self-affirming and self-deprecating routines — for example when Edwyn Collins sings “never known a girl like you before” — and a cheeky boylesque routine to the sound of Cocker (Joe, not Jarvis). A pantomime camel casually saunters by. Elegantly lanky dancers dressed in a blinding outfit of sequins invade the stalls for photo opportunities. This isn’t for everyone but, then again, neither is Shakespeare nor Puccini.
Not immediately obvious from the show title, or indeed from any of the promotional material, is that Ladyboys was not dreamed up in a Patpong beach bar by the kind of Thai-based entrepreneurs who would have long since moved on to flogging bitcoin and sponsoring far-right politicians. It was created by a circus family in the Midlands county of Staffordshire (Congleton, to be precise). Phillip Gandey, once Europe's youngest circus director at seventeen, inherited the family business and was responsible not only for this Fringe favourite but also for bringing the Chinese State Circus to Britain; Ladyboys launched in 1998 as a six-person sideshow alongside it at Edinburgh. He died in 2023 and his daughter Hayley is now the artistic director. The circus pedigree matters, because it is at the heart of both the show's greatest asset (the tent, the logistics, the annual-pilgrimage touring model) and its most conspicuous absence (any actual circus skills on stage).
Despite the new theme of identity and transformation, Full Moon is not a radical departure from the standard Ladyboys formula. More interesting than what happens inside either tent is that both this show and Giffords Circus find themselves at the same crossroads: Giffords went back to family hands last year when co-founder Toti Gifford resumed the chairmanship after a boardroom tussle that hit the headlines. Two second-generation operations, both trading on their founder's vision and both with the chance to reshape a successful enterprise in their own image.
Physically, the two tents perform opposite fantasies. Giffords's 1930s-style big top on a village green sells utopian Englishness to a picnic-hamper crowd and wide-eyed families; the pink Sabai Pavilion sells Thailand-as-theme-park to a Prosecco crowd, complete with Thai street food while Giffords has its Circus Sauce restaurant tent. There are similar economics (destination venue, captive catering, annual tour) but a different target crowd entirely. Giffords, for all its pastoral charm, is a relatively recent addition to the UK circus landscape: it was founded in 2000 by Nell Gifford, an Oxford graduate who romanticised her way into the ring from the outside. One family treats the tent as infrastructure; the other treats it as poetry.
What fills those tents has diverged accordingly. Giffords puts actual circus in its ring — acrobats, horses, clowns — directed by Cal McCrystal, whose physical-comedy pedigree (Cirque du Soleil, One Man, Two Guvnors) and broad industry experience (including Così fan tutte for the ENO) brings proper insight, vision and structural discipline to proceedings. Ladyboys nods towards circus slapstick without any discernable circus skills on stage. Gandey dropped his animals in the late 1980s; Nell's love of horses has led to a perennial feature of the Gifford shows even after her death in 2019.
There is something noteworthy about a show that has outlasted almost every West End production except the one that followed it in Shaftesbury Avenue. Les Misérables sells revolution as tragedy; Ladyboys sell it as a disco number with pyrotechnics. Both have proved, against all reasonable expectation, that the British public will turn up for the same thing year after year if you package it with enough conviction. Full Moon will not change your life. It will not alter your understanding of gender, identity, or the human condition, no matter what the marketing copy insists. But it will send you out into the Shepherd's Bush night with a smile on your face, smelling of sweet chilli sauce, and humming something by ABBA. The Sondheim Theatre, for all its acclaimed dramatics, cannot always promise the same.
The Ladyboys of Bangkok continues in London until 12 July then goes on tour.
Photo credits: The Ladyboys of Bangkok
