Totem

NOTE: The following THREE STAR review dates from 6 January 2011, and this production's premiere at the Royal Albert Hall.

Microbes and monkeys, swamps and springboards, lasers and lotharios: welcome to the latest Cirque du Soleil pan-global mystical extravaganza in which basic circus thrills and skills are dressed up in a luminous wash of New Age claptrap and Third World rock music.

The lighting is spectacular, the acrobatics tremendous. But even avant garde former wunderkind Robert Lepage, directing his second show for his Canadian street-theatre-gone-crazy-commercial counterparts, cannot dispel the pervasive sense of notorious naffness that always surrounds Cirque.

That caveat, I have to say, hasn’t stopped me turning up pretty regularly over the past twenty years, if only to see something as good as the second act love duets here between a Canadian trapeze act and an Italian roller-skating Indian squire and his squaw.

The costumes are exceptional, from the minute we see a human, foetal glitter ball descend from the full height of the building and touch-start the primeval writhings in a bony, spongy adventure playground that looks like a huge cranium. Then, from the depths of the bamboo forest (where lurk the musicians) come... an Italian beach clown, a pair of lifeguards and a beautiful girl in pink who does gym exercises with hand rings.

The Darwinian evolution theme is pretty much dumped as it’s suggested, but that doesn’t stop old Darwin himself skirting the action, chumming up with a hairy ape and revealing himself to be a pretty good juggler in a huge plastic cone with coloured balls.

As an eyeball feast, the show will suffice. But it’s significant that by far the most beautiful and seductive sequence – nothing to do with the circle of life or the mysteries of the universe — is provided by five Chinese ladies in temple outfits on unicycles doing synchronised juggling with tea bowls, flicking them from their feet first into their own head-pieces, then into the others’ and finally in all directions without spilling a single one.