LE CIRQUE INVISIBLE To 23 August.

London.

LE CIRQUE INVISIBLE

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre SE1 8XX To 23 August 2009.
Tue; Thu-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed, Sun 2.30pm.
Audio-described 20 Aug.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.

TICKETS: 0871 663 2500 (£2.50 phone booking fee).
www.southbankcentre.co.uk (£1.45 booking fee).
Review: Carole Woddis 4 August.

Another Chaplin amazes with the skill of their movement.
Once upon a time there was circus with animals and a Big Top. There was also music hall with funny hats, singers, acrobatics, women being cut in half and magicians producing rabbits out of a hat. Today, Jean Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin’s Le Cirque Invisible, which has returned to the South Bank after thirteen years, combines the lot – if not elephants then certainly a crocodile in the form of one of Chaplin’s many splendid apparitions created out of frocks, umbrellas and garden pots, and definitely live quacking friends and furry bunnies who emerge from various magic boxes.

There is much here to please and delight most audiences, if not those whose palates have become crustier and more attuned to magic with an edgier variety. This is the charm of an older, softer time, the kind produced by, for example, the Russan clown Slava, delighting as a child might in its first discovery of `things that you see and now you don’t’: flags that change colour, silly visual jokes to do with paper fishes, a stuffed zebra which simply refuses to come alive despite wild audience encouragement, and masked knees lustily rendering Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.

All of this is undertaken by Thiérrée with a smile of endless sweetness and a showman’s bravura that topples over into an extraordinarily indulgent glut of encores. As a man once said, always leave them wanting more…

What is irresistible about the show, however, is Chaplin. She provides the philosophical backbone with the inventiveness of her images and an awesome physical suppleness - for example, taking a tent-like dress and becoming an animal that rocks and almost, but not quite, topples over. Another time she emerges as an anemone or a horse, whilst a stash of Chinese umbrellas and a later festooning of her body with metallic and silver objects, become further opportunities for exploring the possibilities of movement.

In Chaplin’s hands, motion seems perpetual and evanescent; she glides around the stage, she is never still and is forever burrowing. When she emerges she has mutated into another form, animate or inanimate. She is wondrous.

Performers: Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, Victoria Chaplin.

Lighting: Nasser Hammadi.
Sound: Christian Leemans.

2009-08-07 00:30:10