War and Peace at the Circus, Giffords Circus

A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic of love and internecine war into a very small sawdust ring, with horses, jugglers, aerialists, clowns and gymnasts. And as you park your car on the green and wander over under the quiet afternoon sky to the cute white tent where a rackety little brass band is parping and blaring from inside (and check out the “War and Pizza” trailer for the interval), you are in for a ridiculously good time.

Giffords looks as if it was conjured up out of the contents of an attic, but the collaborators are an A-list team: the show’s director is Irina Brown, born in St Petersburg, former artistic director of Glasgow’s Tron and with productions of opera and theatre for the Royal Opera House and the Mariinsky on her CV, not least the Prokofiev opera of War and Peace, on a rather larger scale than this.

The troupe's founder, Nell Gifford, ran away to join the circus from university, and is evidently a bit away with the fairies to bring up the idea of War and Peace at the Circus. However, in Irina Brown she found a soulmate - the Russian produced the full set of volumes and declared that she would include all its major scenes.

And so she does, in a way. While Natasha dreams of love, a deft aerialist shins up skeins of silk, fluttering them in the air like sheets. Napoleon, declaring his designs on Moscow, is a maniacal knife-thrower, peppering the map from impossible angles with daggers flipped from his mouth, his elbows, his knees. Moscow burns to the antics of two staggeringly deft jugglers dressed as French soldiers, tossing knives and flaming torches with even more surprises than the Flying Karamazov Brothers.

And when the two nations meet at the great ballet of Borodino (250 pages in the novel), France beats Russia because it has two horses, while Russia has only one. History gloriously reduced to essentials.

It has to be said that the characters slightly suffer, as does the larger politico-philosophical import of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. The plentiful cast, young and old, all romp around the sawdust ring in their dressing-up-box aristocratic uniforms and peasant fustian, singing and speaking a punning text that is by Kit Hesketh-Harvey and therefore likely to be witty, only I couldn’t hear the actors’ not-good-enough articulation from my position behind the speakers.

But this is not too important, because there is a fine clown, Tweedy, who does distractingly funny things in between scenes, the hand-balancer is terrific, the orchestra is full of battered old brass instruments and silly hats, and there is the occasional heartstopping moment, such as the strangely erotic riding solo for Pierre Bezukhov’s flirtatious wife Hélène, gorgeously robed in pale grey silk farthingale, riding a horse sidesaddle round and round through complicated dressage while gazing with intense come-hither eyes at a soldier - and simultaneously handling a hawk. This multitalented performer turns out to be Nell Gifford herself (pictured above left by Gem Hall). The whole thing is bananas.

You can also really love a troupe that takes so much care with extra details: the neat burgundy-and-gold trailers with little windows beautifully arranged with model Russian soldiers and shreds of maps, and the richly enjoyable programme which tells us that epics used to be two-a-penny in the travelling circuses of the 19th century - the Battle of Trafalgar was restaged proudly by the Astley Circus only weeks after it occurred in 1805.

These days, the battle being fought by our leaders is over animals in circus, but I hope Giffords, with their charming horses, doves and hawks, will keep the memorable smell of horse poo and sawdust fresh for many small children to come. It’s touring around south and south-west England - I saw it at Stadhampton, Oxfordshire yesterday - and it's total delight.

• Giffords Circus's War and Peace at the Circus tours to The Trout Inn, Lechlade, 7-11 July; The Fox Inn, Barrington 14-20 July; Village Green, Frampton on Severn, 28 July-1 August; Minchinhampton Common 4-16 August; Marlborough Common 19-30 August; Stratton Meadows, Cirencester 2-11 September
• Giffords Circus website
• Find Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl by Nell Stroud (Gifford) on Amazon