Circus Oz

Q. When you’ve only got a month back home in the UK, how do you spend your time?

A. You go see a show from Australia.


Tonight my oldest friend Alistair procured a couple of freebie tickets for us to see Circus Oz performing on the South Bank.

Circus Oz does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s a circus, and some of them are Australian.

And, true to their antipodean origins, many of these acrobats, contortionists and gymnasts spent a good deal of the night up-side down.

Particularly homesick was the clown opening the whole shebang. After the intial topical announcement of "Please do not take photographs, or mention the cricket," this trained professional harlequin walked right out in front of us… on the ceiling.

Really. Heels over head. (N.B.Head over heels is probably an imported phrase from ‘down under’)

But anyway I’m getting off the subject (as he was) I mean I’m starting this entry off on the wrong foot (…) I mean I got out of bed on the wrong side oh forget it.

The point is he walked along the ceiling, and protested sadly that he was an old clown now, and no-one believes him anymore when he tells them that, back in his heyday, he used to walk along the ceiling up there. (points down at the stage floor)

He then proceeded to drink a glass of water, put on his costume and apply his clown make-up, by which time I was looking at my watch impatiently. Sheesh, had we really paid to watch a show that wasn’t even the right way up? Have these Australians really never heard of adapting their material to suit a local audience? If he’d poured his glass of water into an up-turned sink so that we could watch it climb up the plughole in a clockwise direction, then I’d have been impressed, but this aging geezer was getting dressed in front of us – had we actually come to some sort of back-to-front aussie porn show?

Once I’d remembered that neither Alistair nor myself had actually paid for our freebies, I began to feel more optimistic – maybe these guys were going to unwittingly follow the reverse thing through, and pay us the ticket price at the end of the show. Maybe that was why they had been forced to come here from Australia in the first place – they’d lost all their money.

Anyway, the night began impossible and gradually got more so. Other artists joined the aging clown, to juggle up-side down (using the floor), dress-up as trapezing birds, and in one particularly trippy sequence, a guy called Mr Chips got chased around in mid-air by a flying cello.

Truly, the stuff of dreams. (or nightmares if you happen to be a cellist)

Alistair and I could hardly criticise, though.

Outside during the interval, and staying with the topsy-turvey theme that the evening seemed to be taking, Alistair and I took some holiday photos of ourselves by the River Thames in front of Big Ben.



It was at that moment that I began to question just where my place was in the world...


Six months earlier I had stood by another river with Scottish Dave, Kevin and Ian photographing ourselves in front of the Sydney Opera House. (handily located in Sydney)

That had been a holiday photo, and indeed I’d shown it to Alistair, but who on Earth did I think I was going to show these to?


Circus Oz: 9 out of 10.