Gravity takes the night off, by Tom Godfrey

An original contemporary theatre review.

Ten minutes into ‘Slack’, the new show from the acrobatic company Tilt, a woman of about twenty walks calmly to one end of a teeterboard, a heavy wooden see-saw. Two of her colleagues climb onto a platform above the other end, and jump. The board slams down, and she is flung upwards, almost as high as the tent poles, turning three times in the air before landing, feet first, on the shoulders of a man who has been standing on another man’s shoulders all along. The audience gasps as one. She waves, as if she has merely stepped off a bus. Beside me, a man who had spent the first ten minutes checking football scores put his phone away and did not take it out again.

That is the effect of this extraordinary show, which runs in a red and white tent in Victoria Park until the end of the month. It does not ask for your attention. It seizes it.

Tilt’s eight performers have none of the sequins or spangled ringmasters of the traditional circus. They wear loose grey clothes, as if they have wandered in from a rehearsal, and the stage is bare except for a tangle of ropes, a wooden pole, the teeterboard and a battered upright piano. The music, played live by a pianist who also juggles, is sparse and tense. The plainness is clever. With nothing else to look at, every movement becomes enormous.

And what movement it is. Two brothers, Matteo and Enzo Ferrante, perform a hand-balancing routine in which one stands on the other’s head, then on one hand, then on a single finger, or so it appears from row F. The silence in the tent was so complete that I could hear the creak of the pole as a third acrobat climbed it without using her feet. A teenage tumbler flung herself through a hoop barely wider than her shoulders, again and again, faster each time, until the crowd was cheering before she had landed.

There are moments of comedy, too, which come as a welcome release. The juggling pianist drops a club into the piano, retrieves it with his teeth and carries on playing without missing a note. Children in the front row laughed so hard that one of them fell off the bench.

The finale is the show’s masterpiece. All eight performers climb into a single human tower, four layers high, which then begins, slowly and impossibly, to walk. It sways. It leans. It shuffles to the very edge of the ring, so close that the front row leans back as one. Then the top performer, a girl of perhaps fourteen, spreads her arms wide, and the tower holds.

There was a pause before the applause, the kind of pause that only happens when an audience has forgotten to breathe. Then the whole tent rose. If you see one show this summer, make it this one. Just do not sit there checking the football.

The new circus show ‘Slack’ is described as breathtaking. How does the writer try to show this?

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