I’ve never been seduced by the circus. As a motif in children’s literature, particularly taken up by Enid Blyton and Disney. In fact, as an animal-loving child, I think I found it cruel; I wanted Nellie the Elephant to pack her bags and say goodbye to the circus, I longed for her to slip her iron chain. In childless adulthood, I forgot all about it. Until I moved back to Oxfordshire and Giffords Circus appeared on the horizon every summer, its posters slapped on every lamppost from Charlbury to Cheltenham. The posters might have pulled in some punters, but for a certain type of middle-class patron, Giffords needed no advertisement. Everyone knew about it. It was the day out du jour. The young, the old, the child-laden, the childless: all came in their droves.
In an age of AI, CGI effects and algorithm, it is refreshing to be confronted with the real
Its late founder, Nell Gifford, could hardly have imagined that, single-handedly, she would cannily revive the fortunes of circus in this country from vulgar fairground to gentrified Oxfordshire hangout. Along with Tweedy the Clown, a troupe of horses and, one memorable year, a fleet of Dalmatians, Giffords tapped into a middle-class yearning for escapism, providing an acceptable form of olde-worlde folkishness that you could enjoy without the outside lavatory and the mounting bills. You could even buy an Emma Bridgewater Giffords mug (Bridgewater is, after all, Nell’s half-sister) on your way out and not feel as if you had joined the herd. As far as marketing went, it was seamless.
Twenty-four years after the inception of Giffords, Nell’s niece, Lil Rice, has brought back the grit and sweat of the circus with her own circus act, Fool’s Delight. The former Giffords daredevil has revived the village-green circus offer with bonkers avant-garde performance art and a taverna-style dinner afterwards in the grounds of her father’s Oxfordshire house, Ham Court. Elephants, big-shoed clowns and plumed horses this is not. Rather, it is a cross between surrealist theatre and spit-and-sawdust music gig with one eye on highbrow culture – Shakespeare, Swan Lake – and the more literal, slapstick nature of circus where the performers might just fall off their trapeze into your seat. Not since watching Ionesco performed at graduate school by a group of cheerleaders have I worked with such animation to piece a performance together.
Under the striped awning of the big top at the Saturday matinee, children sit on their parents’ laps and cover their ears when the band’s various renditions of French chansons get too loud. One child asks his mother when the clown will appear. In fact, the clown, a ballerina who throws socks at the crowd and turns into a swan and then a drunken bride, has been on stage all along. Whatever we think the circus is – and this definition may vary – it is here, hiding in plain sight, the elephant in the animal-less room.
When I speak to Rice’s father, the artist Matthew Rice, in the interval, he asks me if I noticed that one chunk of the repertoire had been cut due to a sound fault. I reply that, no, I most certainly had not (I do not add that I was busy googling the definition of vaudeville at the end of the first half). But there is something in the bare bones of the performance, some vital energy in the garment laid out with its seams messily showing that I like. In an age of AI, CGI effects and algorithm, it is refreshing to be confronted with the real, the brilliantly unpredictable nature of live performance. Go to see Cirque du Soleil at the Albert Hall with all its perfectly optimised stunts and you wouldn’t get to glimpse behind the curtain, to see rude bolts of the scaffold. I decide that this is all I ask of the circus: to be suspended in mid-air with all the frisson of potentially falling from the pendulum.
At the end of the show, I catch Lil, breathless after debriefing her troupe. Will you take it on tour; will there be animals next year; will Fool’s Delight be the next Giffords I ask without stopping. She smiles knowingly and shakes her head, explaining that the ‘juggernaut’ of Giffords is not what she’s after. I think she might have a point; fill up the big top with too many chins and you lose all the dissidence of the circus itself. On the way to my car, I spot an Emma Bridgewater plate for sale in a corner of the bar. Automatically, I make to buy it before checking myself; I want to stay atop the pendulum for as long as I can.
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