Performance
Cirkopolis, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
FIVE STARS
Cirkopolis, where the workers' world is stiflingly grey. Grey clothes, grey lives, grey routine jobs like that of the clerk (Ashley Carr) at the heart of this wonderfully uplifting show from Canada's Cirque Eloize. The back wall even adds in an expressionist grey, with images redolent of the 1927 film, Metropolis - Carr is just one of the little cogs in the relentless city machine.
Hola! help is at hand. Rebellious flashes of colour - a tie, a weskit, a flame-red frock - creep into the costuming, his desk becomes the centre of a turning world full of jugglers, acrobats, aerial artists and more. The circus comes to him and whisks him away into realms of spirited beauty, poetic elan and innovative derring-do: his gradual liberation - delivered in a vibrant mix of theatricality, evocative music, cunningly choreographed dance and circus skills - is as moving as it is thrilling.
On-screen cogs become on-stage wheels: five agile men interact with the hefty German Wheel, making it a travelling adventure playground for acrobatics while Lea Toran Jenner, in her scarlet dress, spins and whirls in the slender hoop of the Cyr Wheel, defying gravity at every turn. There's flirtation on the Chinese Pole, breath-taking antics on the trapeze, balancing acts where strength and poise is given grace as well. Carr, in clown mode, has a bravura balancing act of his own, judging when to play his sad sack status for comedy and when to touch us with the wistful yearnings that his encounters awaken - his duet with a limply hanging dress is a tour de force of both strands.
There's still time for you to run away to Cirkopolis - it's Edinburgh run ends on Saturday.
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