Theatrical trickster extraordinaire, purveyor of bewilderingly lavish stage illusions to unsuspecting and often jaw-dropped spectators, New York-based magician and theatre maker Geoff Sobelle jumped ship from the Fringe to the International Festival several years back, and his ambitions have grown ever since. Clown Show, however, must be one of his biggest, boldest and most opulent (and also most barbed) creations – it’s not often, for a start, that a show’s stage design (courtesy of Maruti Evans) gets its own astonished applause when the curtain goes up, as it did on opening night.
And understandably so. We’re in a dilapidated circus, complete with big top, sparkly lights and a grotesque audience of sinister creatures (some stuffed, others not) balanced on precarious bleachers. Only the clowns, however, are left as performers. They spend quite a bit of time trying to entertain themselves, and each other, before they inevitably go too far, overreach their abilities and things start to fall apart, in spectacular style.
In case that wasn’t clear, the clowns are in charge, and everything collapses. In a show that’s been commissioned for the International Festival’s all-American theme marking 250 years of independence, the symbolism couldn’t really be clearer, or blunter. Heck, Sobelle even arranges for a bald eagle to get inadvertantly sacrificed (and rise from the dead), a huge elephant to trundle round his stage to precious little purpose or effect, and cherished US patriotic songs to get warped and mangled in pianist Leo Gurevich’s remarkable, deliriously Morecambe-esque playing.
So yes, Sobelle’s monumental, self-destroying creation is clearly about the current parlous state of his home country (and probably the world more generally), and it’s just a furious and full of vitriol as you might imagine with that in mind. But there’s a lot more to it. His clowns are wonderfully ambiguous creations – as clowns have every right to be, of course. They’re often ridiculous, laughable creatures, playing while the world collapses around them, but they’re sometimes far more sympathetic, even innocent figures, with ambitions way beyond their abilities, but trying hard all the same. They want to entertain us, but they don’t know how. They want us to like them, but they don’t know what to do if we do. Perhaps they’re them, but perhaps they’re a bit of us too.
However you interpret what’s going on – and it’s to Sobelle’s immense credit that such a clearly enraged creation offers so many interpretations – Clown Show is an astonishingly ambitious work that’s conceived on a grand scale, but in which so much care has been lavished on tiny details, whether on the glorious wigs in Suzanne Bocanegra’s breathtaking costumes, or how precisely a grand piano might – well, cease to be. There are setpieces aplenty – a creaky cannon-shoot, an anarchic break for popcorn (pictured above) (plus an earworm of a song to accompany it), a near-riot, a Wild West shootout with frankly terrifying horses. Some are more entertaining than others. As in many other of Sobelle’s creations, he sets off processes and lets them run their course – sometimes to intentionally patience-trying effect. But the pacing of his slow, at first barely perceptible descent from joyfully chaotic exuberance to apocalyptic abandon is nonetheless expertly handled.
Sobelle prowls his creation as one among the increasingly desperate mob of clowns, and all of his nine-strong cast perform with astonishing conviction and commitment. It’s a very musical show, too: alongside Leo Gurevich’s piano, shout-outs should also go to music director Mike Dobson’s nifty drumming and Domenica Fossati’s nice line in unconventional Bach. It’s a show of riotous exuberance and often breathtaking excess, but also one that manages to find a strange poetry – and, perhaps, a sense of self-awareness – in its bumbling, doomed characters.
