Review of the latest incarnation of the cabaret-circus spectacle

By packaging jaw-dropping circus skills with burlesque raunch, David Bates was pivotal in reinventing cabaret when he launched La Clique at the Edinburgh Fringe 20 years ago.

Now, however, the motto is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, as he commandingly comperes the latest incarnation of the pizzazz-filmed showcase in London’s Leicester Square sticking closely to the format he so successfully devised.

If you’ve not been before, you’re in for a night of dazzling spectacle, frisky fun and sultry performance. If you have been before, all that remains true – although without much element of surprise. (Yes, you will hear a slowed-down version of Radiohead’s Creep, that cabaret staple, for example)

Certainly, it’s an odd choice that three of the first five acts are aerial performers – a repetition that offering diminishing returns, even if Katharine Arnold adds an appealingly weird and dark back-story to her artistic set. The premise is that she emerges directly from surgery to take to her suspended ring – after Miranda Menzies’ surprising feats of strength and flexibility while suspended by her hair, and Cornelius Atkinson’s strap work.

Still, being elevated does get around any sight-line problems – even though the Spiegeltent is an intimate space, most seats won’t be able to see the business end of what tap-dancer Bayley Graham can do in his slightly cheesy, but undeniably skilled act. 

Gentleman juggler Florian Brooks’s club work is effortlessly fluid, while a routine with a goldfish in a bamboo hoop is more original and witty, playing up a sense of peril for his aquatic sidekick.

Acrobat Danik Abishev impresses with ladder- and hand- balancing, performed while provocatively baring not only his torso but most of his buns of granite in low-hanging shorts.

While sexiness abounds, it is a balding middle-aged man in suspect glasses, frilly shirt and 1970s tuxedo who plays on it most. Asher Treleaven is a dab hand at the diablo – which may be the least sensual of all the circus talents, but he treats it as if it were the most potent of aphrodisiacs. There’s more than a touch of Austin Powers to this, but it sure as hell works.

Later he returns for a reading of some bad-sex prose, with an energy at odds with the rest of the high-octane evening, but remains wryly funny.

The biggest thrills are provided by the fearless Isis Clegg-Vinell and her costars. She’s whirled around the stage by Nathan Price in a dizzyingly impressive roller-skate routine that’s become a La Clique staple. And to end the show they are joined by  Atkinson under the name Trio Vertex, back in the air but offering a truly heart-stopping climax to this night of spectacle.

Review date: 15 Nov 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Leicester Square Spiegeltent