Guest Blog: 'We Want To Elevate And Evolve' : SOPHIE'S SURPRISE PARTY Team on Cabaret, Circus and Audience Satisfaction

Sophie’s Surprise Party, at its core, is a cabaret line up show. For those not in the know, a line up show is just a bunch of acts, one after the other, sometimes with a host, sometimes not. It’s a format we love, and one that we all cut our teeth doing. But we wanted to elevate that format, and evolve it.

We love Circus. But we also love theatre, and music, and clever jokes and parody, and breaking the fourth wall…and pushing boundaries, audience interaction, immersion and shows that feel like experiences.

So when we decided to make a show, we wanted to make something which straddled the genres we love, and had its own unique place within our industry. There are plenty of contemporary circus companies making beautiful acrobatic movement pieces, and some incredible line up cabaret shows with strong casting and great hosts. But we felt there was a gap in the middle for something which felt truly like an ensemble piece, with clear character arcs (if not narrative, per se), which made people properly laugh, but which also had world class technical skill level and was built with the intention of giving the audience a good time.

Getting funding for British Circus seems almost impossible, especially for a project with  commercial objectives, and so it often feels like we are lagging behind other countries - Canada, France and Australia being obvious examples - in terms of having home grown companies with successful touring programmes and a global reach. These countries, and many more, have well established contemporary circus companies, and also a national and cultural ‘style’ of circus work. But (as well as 90s music and dad jokes) we love a challenge…so we thought YOLO, let’s give it an entirely unfunded, potentially financially idiotic, go.

We started small, with three late night scratch shows and zero budget. In many ways this was, and still is, the beauty of the show; we’re scrappy, inventive and understand how to make the most out of what we have - but we’ve been stunned by the incredible responses from our audiences and by how many people have come back again and again to watch us.

We’ve learnt a lot, but one thing that’s been surprisingly but gratifyingly apparent, given our self-inflicted underdog status in the world of circus, is that UK circus artists are good at creating acts. We understand musicality, arcs, how to button an act at the end, how to introduce a concept quickly to an audience, how to do splits for claps but in a way that doesn’t feel like a sellout, and all without taking ourselves too seriously.

Our theory is that the wild and thriving gig culture in London in our formative years as circus artists (now sadly declining but that’s a whole other article) was the best learning ground for making acts with a concept, a personality, that had a beginning middle and end within your allocated four or five minutes, and which you could whip up quickly and efficiently.

Sophie’s Surprise Party is our love letter to British pop culture, our cabaret industry and its history, and our desire to knock people off their seats but with our tongues firmly in our cheeks.

Sophie’s Surprise Party is at Underbelly Boulevard from 11 November - 10 January 2026