NoFit State’s carnation – Brighton Festival review

NoFit State have a long and illustrious relationship with the Brighton Festival – a personal favourite being a trip to Hove lawns, mere metres from the sea side, to watch their top notch Lexicon in 2018.

Their new piece, carnation, is an angrier, gloomier show for darker times. A series of political scandals, elections and pandemics later, the show feels about as close to state-of-the-nation circus as you can get.

We start with a large, jungle-gym style tree, slowly dismantled as if part of some industrial upheaval. From the flotsam, rumblings of a revolution – camo jackets, placards and angry shouts abound. Some moments between circus sequences feature projections of headlines about Epstein projected onto the floor while apparatus is brought on and off stage.

You have to applaud the bracing move to confront the present day – though the attempt is more laudable than the results. Conceptually and structurally, the two-act experience, accompanied by live music, does feel haphazard – a laboured (pun intended) series of references to Animal Farm, including the token animal masks, do little to further the point.

It is saved for the most part by a packet of brilliant sequences – aerial work across the show is generally excellent, and one passage that highlights the symbiotic link between wrestling and floor gymnastics (accompanied by some terrific banquine) is as electrifying as the afternoon gets. Novelty comes in the form of a fantastic slinky-based act, which feels like a neon twist on your more generic juggling act. Flamboyant high wire work is equally deft.

Pacing could definitely be tightened (and as the show’s run continues this will naturally take place), but there certainly seems to be the seed of an interesting idea at play here – replete with a stirring note of optimism at the end of the show.

Circus is often perceived as an escape, a couple of hours of wonder away from the real world. What if, like so many of the multi-talented ensemble, that idea is turned on its head?