Tweedy’s MASSIVE Circus (“but it’s tiny!”, shouts the crowd) unfolds in a bijou village green big top, summoning the spirit of circus’s golden age. “Just like Giffords?” says a sidekick. “Don’t say that!” says Tweedy. The Scottish clown has been a Giffords Circus mainstay for 16 years – but this is a side project, “where the clowns are in charge of everything”, and the emphasis is less on virtuosity, of which there’s plenty, than antic comedy. It’s a lovable lark from start to finish.
Some credit must go to director John Nicholson, for years a deft orchestrator of tenuous plots and comic idiocy with his company Peepolykus. There’s more of the same here, as Tweedy and pals valiantly cover for all the acts who’ve not shown up, in the face of mounting scepticism from stern benefactor Madame La Reine (Loren O’Dair). So we get Tweedy proving himself a vampire with recourse to a crap/ingenious mirror routine; Tweedy pretending to be “Baby Arturo”, a linking rings magic act taken to slapstick extremes; and supposed stage manager Sam Goodburn, dragooned into a routine requiring him to dress and undress while unicycling.
I saw Goodburn do the same act in Edinburgh last summer, in a street show that eclipsed much of what I saw in theatres. He’s terrific again here. But tonight isn’t primarily about the acrobatic skills: there are plenty of dropped balls and plates that don’t keep spinning. But there’s also music, toilet humour and improbable narrative goings-on, like the time travel sequence that ends with a silks act performed by an inflatable dinosaur. Tweedy is the incorrigible engine behind it all, keeping the show on the road with minimal subtlety but with a juvenile delinquency kids will love and grownups find hard to resist. A tiny circus, perhaps – but for families, a big treat.