Charm is as invisible as the circus but as undeniably present in Le Cirque Invisible, an adorable little presentation for which parents should go miles with children to see this month. Charlie Chaplin’s fourth daughter and her husband are not young things any more, and their two-person show is at least 40 years old in its various guises - but they simply keep adding and subtracting gags, costumes, dressing-up box illusions, magic tricks, rabbits, soap-bubbles, locking down a hall of children and parents for two and a half hours in raptures.
Victoria Chaplin is a bendy little acrobat with extraordinary waist-length brown hair and a wizened little face - only her face matches Wikipedia’s record that she is 59. Jean-Baptiste Thierrée (to rhyme with cheery) is 73, a Benny Hill sort of grandfather who surely must travel with a pantechnicon full of outfits and plastic suitcases painted to match. He makes funny sight-gags with quickfire costume changes, dresses entirely in tapestry (even his spectacles have tapestry lenses), or in zebra stripes, or like a grand Arlecchino clown, with little clown heads on his legs (who come alive to sing Bizet’s Pearl Fishers duet).
He chortles at children while doing little tricks about invisible fish or edible candles that look as if he found them all in discarded Christmas crackers. He says “Hup!” softly when he does his punchline. He is so twinkly that even bumbled or obvious tricks can be indulged as part of the persona. And you can’t not love a magician who fills the stage with rabbits.
If he is absurd and comic, she is surreal, even witchy. There is a strange and exact imagination at work that has dreamed up how to create from three or four pieces of sophisticatedly constructed fabric fables about fish swallowing shrimps, or sea-clams, or mythological horses (that’s some sewing machine she must have), but then she also has the physical elasticity to manipulate the illusions. She turns herself into a spectacular otherworldly creature with scarlet parasols, which she unfurls around her like a fantastical vehicle of spinning wheels - then contrives to leave it apparently independent while another, more moth-like, shredded, ancient little umbrella insect tentatively creeps into view and then seems to turn to dust before our eyes.
Still more breathtaking is the musical costume made from glasses and kitchen pans. It looks like a fantastical glass chess-piece, and she makes a faerie tinkling music from it by brushing all her components with wooden wands. She also does a remarkably effective high-wire act in a Victorian nightie, like a madwoman sleepwalking, her hair flowing all around her. Ah, and she unicycles too.
There is a lighting wizard assisting her, Nasser Hammadi, and Christian Leemans’ soundscore wraps the viewer in imaginative switches and suggestions of period or mood, from fairgrounds to funereal Victorian salons of creepily ticking clocks, or sudden bangs and crashes. Thierrée rides a tandem with a skeleton (and a dog skeleton wags its tail from the rack behind); then he and Chaplin join up in a baroque ballet of two sci-fi creatures made of bicycle parts - every one identifiable by a child, and not threatening but magic-carpet-inventive, with flapping wings made from wheels, beaks from saddles, rolling eyes from pedals.
“This is crazy!” yelped a little girl near me, and yes, I must stop myself going on adding spoilers to your surprise from the cornucopia here. But one of the bonuses is that even when you have seen some of these before in previous Thierrée/Chaplin visits, it amuses you just to contemplate the devising of each tiny shred of the entertainment. This is pure craziness, just two grandparently people laying their complementary fantasies before you with a lifetime’s knowledge of how to entertain, and creating a little piece of theatrical enchantment.
- Le Cirque Invisible is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, till 25 August
- See what's on at the Southbank Centre this season
Add comment