Timber! would be best described as a folk-themed lumberjack circus show. Its creators, Cirque Alfonse, hail from rural Quebec, but often, as they indulge in jigs and reels, banjo and mandolin, amongst acrobatics and action, their antics recall the more familiar backwoods traditions of the Appalachians, their hillbilly US counterparts. However, the afternoon matinee where I caught the show was filled with families, lots of kids coming to the end of their Christmas break. They were undoubtedly more interested in the axe-juggling and crosscut saw-skipping than the anthropological roots. Quite right too for Timber!, despite a palpable pride in its origins, is a 90 minute visual frolic rather than earnestly academic.
The stage has a row of rough-hewn planks lined up vertically at the back and contains a variety of large logs, a cartwheel and a facsimile of an old wooden outhouse. The performers kick things off with a sing-along. The Cirque Alfonse troupe consists of three heavily bearded, lumberjack-clad male acrobats, one of whom is Antoine Carabinier Lépine, their leader; two male musicians, one of whom is a ringer for Serge Pizzorno of Kasabian; female dancer, Julie, who is Lépine's sister; another multi-instrumentalist woman; Lépine's father Alain, who looks like a hick Santa Claus and hams up his Grandpa Walton-like role; and a two year old grandson who pops onstage for a couple of coy appearances, notably for the final bow.
The opening song is all in French as, indeed, is the rest of the show. Sometimes the afternoon's comedy impact is undoubtedly muted by the language barrier and when patriarch Alain attempts occasional English repartee his accent is so thick it renders it almost impenetrable. Fortunately Timber! is based on physicality and, while it starts slowly, with slapstick food-chopping and a hoedown, it soon hots up.
The first highlight is a log-rolling competition, wherein two of the men balance their way up and down the stage, but this is soon surpassed by later displays such as, notably, a sequence where a length of wood about seven feet in length is held and one of the acrobats does mid-air somersaults upon it. Also the aforementioned saw-jumping, wherein a dangerous-looking two-man forest saw is whirled round and round and leapt over like a skipping rope. There are a number of gags based around "Gramps" going to the outhouse, bored by their antics, but perhaps the funniest, for sheer visual zest, is when a sleeping Grandpa is hauled aloft from his rocking chair on a wire, floating about, half-asleep, spun and thrown above the audience.
About two thirds of the way through, the lights are dimmed for a series of more aesthetic exercises, including mid-air rope-work spins and displays from Julie Carabinier Lépine and much use of the cartwheel by another of the troupe. The end of the show, though, is back to full light and spectacle, with extraordinary four way way hand-axe juggling that makes me very glad I'm not in the front row, and the use of a crude seesaw jumped on from on high by two acrobats to fire a third into the air. Then it's one more hoedown and we're done. Cirque Alfonse are a family unit - one of the other male acrobats, Jonathan Casaubon, is Julie's husband - and their presence is warm and contagious, as is their enthusiasm for their folk-circus fusion. What they do is absorbing, entertaining and, upon occasion, spectacular, but I've a feeling they will further fine-tune these stage dynamics and some form of this show will go onto become a groundbreaking crossover world-beater.
Watch the trailer for Timber!
