You could put forward a theory after watching Timber!, Southbank Centre’s newest circus act from Circus Alfonse, that its clunkiness, solidity, and general slowness is part of its authentic charm. It’s phooey of course, as the first and only real criteria a circus must fulfil is for it to entertain and in that, Timber! fails.
Timber! was put together in the French Canadian outback by a brother and sister as a 60th birthday present for their old dad Alain who’d spent his life as a wallpaper-hanger but had always had a hankering to be on the stage. He’d driven the siblings hundreds of miles each week to stage school and they’d both ended up in the circus and Timber! is their thank you to him.
The aesthetic is Quebec’s lumberjack and logging tradition, with the boys all sporting beards of various sizes and bushiness, the two girls in their checked shirts and dungarees, and the set consisting of wood, wood, and more wood. And when the action starts, guess what? More wood! Yes, you get the picture.
Old man Alain (now 66) wanders about the set like, well, like it’s his birthday (still), obviously loving the limelight and it’s difficult to begrudge him that, but it has to be said that he doesn’t contribute a whole lot to the proceedings. In one ‘ouch’ moment for all us oldies, he is suddenly hoisted from his chair and suspended bouncing on a wire above the stage. He’s then twanged back and forth, looking like a gnomic christmas bauble, in such a bone-jarring way that you fear for his spine.
The boys and girls meanwhile are busy throwing small hand axes at each other, slowly. They’re heavy little axes you see, which don’t exactly zip from one hand to another, giving the impression they’re being juggled underwater. It’s not exactly scintilating, but this is the warm up, right?
The folk songs that intersperse or mingle with the action are in French, as are Alain’s rantings and ravings when he goes into a small cabin at the side of the stage to have a poo, and the younger guys won’t stop stamping on the top of it (the kids and the French people in the audience particularly loved this bit). The language, unfortunately, is a barrier as it means we don’t get to know the characters on stage. The beards don’t help either as it’s difficult to distinguish who’s who when everyone looks like Steve Bell.
Thinking back, I’m having problems remembering the tricks they performed as, instead of the tension being racheted up and the acts becoming more and more dangerous, more and more thrilling, it stayed on a plateau of the humdrum. No trick seemed to have a beginning, a middle, or an end: they just floated along in a haze of woodsmoke and sweat.
A girl brought out a whip. Oooooh, I thought, this’ll be good, but she didn’t use it to do anything except crack it like a mistress ordering a recalcitrant bunch of bears to parade around a ring. It went nowhere, as did a clog dancing routine played out on the big solid table, and as did the log-sawing which saw two beards saw a log with a log saw while the rest of the troupe sat on the log to keep it steady. This was presumably to show that the saw was real as then one beard swung it around in a circle while two beards jumped over it (jumped….ish. They more sort of skipped around the edges).
Sometimes the music became beautifully atmospheric, as when a haunting tune was played on some old wine bottles, or when the band produced a bevvy of jew’s harps, but the singing left a lot to be desired, most of it being so out of tune that I cringed both inwardly and outwardly.
The lights go down. A torch is shined upon Alain sitting in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe. He begins to tell us a tale, in English this time (pity I could only make out one in every five words). Circus Alfonse’s trump card is pulled. Little Arthur, the youngest member of the family at only 2, appears by his grandpappy’s big shadow head and dances and claps along to the story, a big beaming smile covering his tiny chops. ‘Aaaaah,’ went the audience. ‘Bleugh,’ went cynical old me.
This circus runs until the end of the month as part of Southbank Centre’s Festival of Neighbourhood with Circus Alfonse fitting in with this theme by dint of their being a family, and the ones who aren’t family being from the ‘village next door’ to the family. It’s a nice little tie-in, but Timber! has some hard circus shoes to follow as London audiences will still have the exciting Limbo and the very good Flown still in their minds. And Timber! is just that bit too creaky to compete.
What: Timber! by Circus Alfonse
Where: Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London
When: Until July 31, various times
Tickets: £15-£32
For more information, CLICK HERE:
Running time: 90 minutes (no interval)
Would I see it again: No
Stars: Two
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