Clown Show – King’s Theatre
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 draw...