Last week (after supper at Skylon) I went to see Cirque Invisible at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the South Bank. It's the third time I've seen them, a contrast to my usual approach of always trying to see new companies. I don't think I've ever seen a single company more than twice before this. The first time I saw Jean-Baptiste Thierree and Victoria Chaplin was over 20 years ago in the now closed Mermaid Theatre. I next saw them at the Riverside Studios, and now here.
They have not aged well. Or maybe it's because I've seen so much circus now that I've got very specific preferences. I like close-up work, work that doesn't involve special effects, work that doesn't use standard equipment such as trapezes. This was close-up (we were in the front row, close enough to catch an orange thrown by Jean-Baptiste, close enough to fear that one of the rabbits might leap onto my wheelchair). But unfortunately it was so close that I could see the workings of the magic tricks: I could see the false bottom in the jar when a handkerchief was pushed in, I could see the way a coin was hidden. Perhaps Jean-Baptiste was getting old and slower. Perhaps showing the workings was deliberate. Perhaps it would have been more exciting from further away. I just know I was disappointed.
I did enjoy watching Victoria Chaplin's transformations from tea-drinker to dragon, from cyclist to mermaid. I was charmed hearing children's cries of excitement and delight. But the show as a whole didn't work for me. As Heracleitus said (yes, I did study Classics at university), you can never step into the same river twice. It's a maxim I should bear in mind the next time I try to recapture a magical experience.
