Review: SHOWDOWN, Albany Theatre

It’s been seven years since the X Factor graced our screens, and at least a decade since the ITV talent show behemoth was actually culturally relevant. Nonetheless, satirical circus show Showdown demonstrates that there’s still a healthy nostalgic appetite for comedy that skewers the show’s cloying cliches.

Swapping questionable Coldplay covers for jawdropping acrobatic stunts, this production from Upswing – their previous work includes a filmed mockumentary on the contemporary circus world – is structured as the final of a televised competition to be “the new face of circus”, helmed by Rhys Hollis’ audaciously camp host clad in a gold sequined dinner jacket.

All the early 2010s Saturday night tropes are here – there’s a knowing nod to the ubiquitous melodramatic sob story, and the script also handles the genre’s troubling use of racial stereotypes with toe-curling humour. There’s also plenty of interaction with the “studio audience” – we have the chance to ‘vote’ by booing or cheering in each of the eight rounds, though the company perhaps pushes it slightly too far when they ask unsuspecting spectators to perform party tricks.

This relentless satire in no way detracts from the actual performances on display from the six acrobat ‘contestants’, which are, of course, spectacular. In just over an hour, there’s time for trapeze routines, a pole dance duet, some extreme see-sawing, and Jaide Annalise’s particularly otherwordly dance performed with an oversized hoop, among others.

The problem, though, is that sometimes the show doesn’t quite know whether the audience is in on the joke. The tone can ricochet wildly between encouraging the crowd to turn an overly competitive acrobat into a pariah, and conveying a more serious insight into the psychological effects this kind of artistic competition can have on its participants. This disconnect could be a way to make the audience feel our own complicitness, but the shifts in tone come a little too suddenly to pull this off.

Marketing materials promise that the show will “delve into the contestants’ ambition”, but this doesn’t extend beyond cookie cutter designations of each cast member as the ‘mean girl’, the ‘outsider’, the plucky older lady, and so on, mimicking rather than deconstructing the X Factor’s stock character types. When the script does allow the acrobats some extended dialogue, it can be laughably one-note, especially in a machismo-packed fight scene early on.

Where the company’s physical comedy and character work lands better is actually during the routines themselves – there’s a moment where a aerial rope performer gets physically manhandled off of her apparatus, a smart way to convey the pressure the performers feel to fit the mould. Still, though, we don’t learn enough about the contestants to make their eventual disillusionment with the industry in the climactic scene feel earned.

Showdown is certainly ambitious in its attempts to say something about the exploitative realities of the performing arts, all while hanging ten feet in the air or doing a headstand. The tricky satirical balancing act doesn’t quite stick the landing, but there’s still a certain cathartic joy in cheering for your favourite backflip.

Showdown tours the UK until 23 July