Tweedy’s Massive Circus review – a lovable lark from

Culden Faw Estate, Henley-on-Thames
The Scottish clown and his pals have taken over in a family caper combining comedy, slapstick, dropped plates and acrobatic skills

Tweedy’s MASSIVE Circus (“but it’s tiny!”, shouts the crowd) unfolds in a bijou village green big top, summoning the spirit of circus’s golden age. “Just like Giffords?” says a sidekick. “Don’t say that!” says Tweedy. The Scottish clown has been a Giffords Circus mainstay for 16 years – but this is a side project, “where the clowns are in charge of everything”, and the emphasis is less on virtuosity, of which there’s plenty, than antic comedy. It’s a lovable lark from start to finish.

Some credit must go to director John Nicholson, for years a deft orchestrator of tenuous plots and comic idiocy with his company Peepolykus. There’s more of the same here, as Tweedy and pals valiantly cover for all the acts who’ve not shown up, in the face of mounting scepticism from stern benefactor Madame La Reine (Loren O’Dair). So we get Tweedy proving himself a vampire with recourse to a crap/ingenious mirror routine; Tweedy pretending to be “Baby Arturo”, a linking rings magic act taken to slapstick extremes; and supposed stage manager Sam Goodburn, dragooned into a routine requiring him to dress and undress while unicycling.

At Cheltenham Racecourse, 5-14 July; London Underbelly festival, 19–27 July; and Circus Hub on the Meadows, Edinburgh, 3–21 August