It’s a Sunday evening. I hate Sunday evenings. Sunday evenings for me are the most depressing period of the whole week. Your housemates are too hungover for a pint, everyone’s gone home to recuperate for work, you realise only too late the supermarket’s shut and end up getting mugged at the corner shop whilst buying dehydrated bread. I want to go out, albeit apprehensively. I reach for a flyer displaying a curious sepia-drenched woman holding an oval looking glass to her eye and a logo that reads Madame Pain’s Boudoir Circus
“Be shocked, amazed, fascinated, and enthralled!” Now I’m completely detached from modern-day circus and harbour little interest in burlesque artforms, yet I find myself deep in South East London gormlessly wondering around a lifeless industrial estate. Eventually I arrive and am hastily ushered inside. I unexpectedly find a bustling makeshift foyer almost to capacity, just in time for the directors’ welcome.
The production’s been thrown to support the Hanger Arts Trust, a charity set up to run East London’s Aircraft Circus. Following an enthusiastic introduction we shuffle into a small arena surrounded by trapezes, arial silk, dancing poles and suspended cage. I feel like I’ve entered Max Mosley’s private quarters.
From the moment the actors slowly emerge from the scenery for the first act I’m subjected to an hour of meticulously choreographed arial acrobatics, exotic dance and aloft gymnastics. A tale is told of Madame Pain’s daughter falling for a strapping male colleague, much to Ms Pain’s disapproval, alongside fear and loathing amonst the performers ending in a climactic mutany against the protagonist.
The single most impressivve feat of the whole production was the fact that it was clearly an ambition build up from the ground on a shoestring and executed to a tee. There was an omnipresent vibrance throughout the night with impressive physical theatrics and a rustic vibrance unique to niche creative projects. I mean, how else are you going to get people to a fucking industrial estate in the middle of nowhere?
It’s somewhat fitting to sum up the event by describing the gravity of the show as: exceptional.
