The Sugar Beast Circus & Milkwood Rodeo

A red-brick church in north London seems like an unlikely place to seek the razzmatazz and chicanery of Barnum’s fabled three rings, but inside the staid stonework of Jacksons Lane Theatre, Sugar Beast Circus present an evening of swing music, trickery and melancholy meditation upon the dubious art of the circus.

Milkwood Rodeo combines video installation with live circus performance: a disembodied voice intones the tale of Frank, the clown who vanished mysteriously the night the monsoon came, while an aerialist swoops and rotates with aching slowness, swinging eerily among a brace of miniature carousel ponies. The effect is languid, creepy, beguiling, but the recorded narrative and the acrobatic skills seem to exist in different universes. Geneva Foster Gluck, directing, doesn’t quite manage to merge the vocabularies of verbally telling and physically showing, and while the act is unsettlingly open-eyed about the realities of the big top, a lack of confidence in its own potential theatricality limits the impact of its morbid glamour.

The Sugar Beast Circus is a more achieved piece of work, musing on a meeting that never was between showman P. T. Barnum and father of evolution Charles Darwin. Performers Sara Lundstedt, Lilli Mühleisen and Natalie Reckerta are depressingly resplendent in torn fishnets and sequin-crusted leotards, pacing the stage with the powerful boredom of caged lions. Their practiced sequence of stunts plays on nature, creation, and illusion, on the fascinated self-fashioning that fills the void left by a departed God.

This is a performance inspired by some big ideas, neatly and wittily manifested. Two girls mirror each other’s postures on a spinning hoop, fixedly indifferent to everything else, whirling through the strains of Paper Moon. A series of not-terribly-convincing performing bears vie to be regarded as the most authentic trained beast. A lion-taming act takes a turn for the strange, in a Carter-esque gesture that finds vulgar glee in subverting its own terms of engagement. And all Darwin’s objections are drowned in a cacophony of bright lights, vacant smiles and defiant glitter.

Neither The Sugar Beast Circus nor Milkwood Rodeo is, as yet, a completely satisfying dramatic experience, but both display intelligence, and a keen desire to interrogate the tawdry, magical, dreadful world of the circus. And there’s more contemporary circus to come at Jacksons Lane this autumn, in a schedule determined to promote the jagged cutting edge of this seductively strange age-old art-form.