There is something deliciously appropriate about entering Edinburgh’s newly refurbished King’s Theatre, one of the city’s great theatrical survivors, to discover that Geoff Sobelle has built a crumbling American big top inside it. One theatre gloriously restored, another about to fall spectacularly to pieces before our eyes.
I have been looking forward to Clown Show. Sobelle is one of America’s great contemporary exponents of physical theatre, and what he and his extraordinary company deliver here is less a narrative than a fever dream, a smorgasbord of images, sounds, illusions and catastrophes which gradually coalesce into a devastating portrait of America.
The arrival is magnificent. Clowns troop through the audience towards the stage, singing as the curtain is gradually drawn back to reveal an extraordinary vision of the inside of a big top. Great loops of red-and-white striped fabric soar into the darkness, studded with rows upon rows of lights, gilding the image like stars against a black sky. At either side, American bleachers rise upwards, populated by full-sized figures, apparently spectators like us, although some subsequently become rather more intimately involved in proceedings.
It is an image of colour, decadence, excess and simply too much of everything. In other words, it is already America. Roll up, roll up: the greatest show on earth is open for business.
And Sobelle keeps adding to it. A full-sized elephant appears. There are giant cannons, impossible contraptions and an exploding popcorn machine which eventually produces popcorn on a scale that begins to engulf not merely the stage but the audience. I won’t spoil precisely how that develops. Suffice to say, when Clown Show promises something is going to pop, it really does pop.
But what can we believe?
That question increasingly seems to me to sit at the heart of Clown Show. A clown smiles, or perhaps he scowls. A man plays a piano beautifully, except we can see he cannot possibly be playing it as the instrument is gradually dismantled and destroyed before our eyes. An accordion similarly disintegrates into a pile of rubbish, yet somehow the music continues.
We know what we are hearing. We know what we are seeing. The two things cannot both be true.
Welcome to America.
This is theatre built around our complicity in illusion, but in a world of fake news, fake images and competing realities, Sobelle takes that familiar theatrical contract somewhere considerably darker. We know we are being deceived yet happily participate in the deception. Perhaps we even prefer it.
The clown is the perfect metaphor. Is he fool or truth-teller? Is the catastrophe accidental, or is somebody controlling it? If everything is collapsing around him but the show continues regardless, at what point do we stop applauding?
Sobelle performs alongside Sophie Bortolussi, Nikki Calonge, Mike Dobson, Domenica Fossati, Leo Gurevich, Gideon Irving, Jenn Kidwell and Elvis Perkins. What looks like chaos is, of course, anything but. The precision required to make this degree of theatrical destruction appear spontaneous is formidable.
The music is extraordinary. Dobson provides music direction, with original music by Perkins, Dobson, Gurevich and Irving, and it runs through the production like another character. The quality of the playing is superb.
So too is the sound. Tei Blow’s sound design, supported by an exceptional technical operation, is among the finest I have heard in Edinburgh this year. Maruti Evans’ extraordinary set and lighting, Thomas Jenkeleit’s props and Suzanne Bocanegra’s costumes combine with it to create moments when I simply don’t know where to look.
Evans’ big top also gives the production somewhere to fall from. What begins as an intoxicating celebration of American spectacle can gradually be dismantled and corrupted. The circus advertises itself as the greatest show on earth even as its machinery begins to fail.
Appropriately, Clown Show arrives during America’s 250th anniversary year. Sobelle has traced its inspiration partly to the extraordinary 2024 presidential debate in which two men seeking arguably the most powerful job in the world ended up arguing about their golf handicaps. You couldn’t make it up. Or perhaps you could. That is precisely the problem.
By the end, comedy has transformed into something approaching an American apocalypse.
Two clowns drag a turntable around the stage like Mother Courage times two, hauling the accumulated debris of America behind them. The national iconography itself becomes grotesque. The Statue of Liberty transforms into a skull-faced harbinger of death, tolling a bell while holding the vast Stars and Stripes. Nearby, the bald eagle, symbol of American freedom and power, lies dead on a platter, ready to be served.
It is an astonishing tableau.
Yet I don’t read Clown Show simply as an attack on America. There is sadness here alongside the satire. These clowns inhabit the circus. They continue trying to operate its machinery even as it disintegrates around them. They are not outsiders pointing and laughing at the wreckage.
They are pulling it behind them.
And perhaps that is what makes Clown Show so powerful. For all its magnificent visual invention, brilliant musicianship and moments of sheer ridiculousness, there is something profoundly unsettling underneath.
The piano has fallen apart.
The circus is collapsing.
The eagle is dead.
But don’t worry.
The music is still playing.
Playing until Sunday 30th August, https://boxoffice.eif.co.uk/edinburghinternationalfestival/website/eventlist.aspx
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 27th August 2026
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 40mins