The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow
Heaven
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
A Rose is a ruse is a total freakout -as the packed and ogling house in Newmarket Heaven discovered when the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow made its only- shall we say- appearance in Adelaide. Out of Seattle, the Weimar of the New World, and late of the Lollapalooza road show in the US, Mr Rose and his associates do their very best to keep their audiences entirely captivated. We are not freaks, says Jim, we are human marvels.
Take Matt “the Tube” Crowley for example. The shy pharmacist from Montana set things going with a few condom tricks – up the nose and out the mouth perhaps, or put it over your head and inflate it till it bangs. Then there’s the angle grinder generating a savage arc of sparks into which Matt thrusts a face wrapped around a cigarette. He lights up with smile. To follow, Matt blows up a hot water bottle to the size of an armadillo and, cajoled by Jim Rose’s sneering banter, succeeds in blasting it to shreds.
Rose, the master of ceremonies has a few tricks of his own. Ouch, he screeches as Miss Beebie, the show’s stage manager, fires darts into his back. The Human Dartboard ! – he bellows, ouch. Meanwhile at stage left a crazed person draped in a fishnet veil and wearing a silk top hat is persuading a bank of synthesisers to sound like hurdy gurdies from hell.
The pace is relentless. Out with the darts and on with – Mr Lifto, a gangly, dangerously pale individual with pink hair and a variety of piercings. The son of a carnival performer we are told but a marvel in his own right. He slips out of his satin tutu and starts hanging tough. Irons from the earlobes- steam irons that is. Plastic Man. Irons and a concrete block from the nipples, stretched
little dugs. Rose raves, Lifto looks passively into the middle distance as he puts a coat hanger through the nose. For modesty a screen is produced for Lifto’s pierce de resistance. From the prepuce, people. A brick descends in silhouette until Jim Rose storms through – are you having fun Adelaide ? Down comes the sheet and there is Mr Lifto, unaccommodated man, folks, hanging by a thread. To calm things down a bit Jim took the stage, swallowing razor blades and dragging them out again on a string.
After interval it’s the Torture King. Not to be outdone Jim staples a ten dollar note to his face. But the TK is pretty hard to beat. Chewing up a bulb – Osram pearl 75 watts it looked like- he turns to the human pincushion routine. He is not pre-pierced, shrieks Jim in a frenzy as the hatpins go through the arm and eyesocket, not to mention the one through his cheeks. He doesn’t say much, drools Jim, he’s …lugubrious. Beautiful, he coos, Science ! I will never exploit you Torture King says Jim. Then, spinning towards the crowd, he reprimands some for not watching. You’re not watching, he screams, you won’t get your money’s worth. Aha, the subtext. Like, who’re the real freaks here, eh Jim ? Tod Browning where are you tonight ?
The Torture King climbed a ladder of swords then hooked himself to a generator and made a fluoro tube in his mouth light up. When he put a circular fluoro on his head, Rose called the crowd to bow down before Electric Jesus. Just to get differently flakey.
At that point the veiled organist disrobes and drags himself to the full extent of his neck chain. He is tattooed with a jigsaw puzzle pattern across his entire body, shaven head and all. This is Enigma. Why? asks Jim ponderously, Why ? Enigma eats things – worms, maggots, crickets. Don’t eat that it’s been on the floor, screams Jim. Look at him- Jim’s spiel is in full flow now- twenty-four years old, apart from working in a music store what will he ever be able to do at fifty ? Enigma swallowed swords, lifted weights from his eyesockets and returned snarling to the Korg to provide crescendos for Jim’s straitjacket routine.
Matt the Tube came back for a spot of gavage. Tubing up the nose and into the stomach. Science ! exults Jim. The road to excess leads also to the palace of wisdom. But did William Blake know about 44 ounces of Vic Bitter being siphoned into the stomach and sluiced out again. You’re not watching. No Jim, not really. After Matt the Tube’s escapade Jim jumps into the audience which parts like the Red Sea. Panic is not the word. Everybody’s running from me like I killed the Lindbergh kid, he drily observes. Jim’s eyes bulge as he takes his `volunteer’ back on stage. To walk on top of him while he lies on a heap of broken glass. Get your ass in that glass is the mantra we are instructed to repeat. Jim rises up unbloodied and unbowed for his final rave. They don’t have an album so we can buy a T-shirt instead. All the gang come back out to sign shirts. All our pals from this Robert Crumb nightmare – Matt, Lifto, Enigma, the Torture King.
May all your days be circus days. Jim signs off like he’s Bing Crosby. The audience has just gawked at ninety minutes of the fastest, strangest, crassest and wittiest entertainment imaginable. Not since Archaos was in town have we seen anything like it. Jim Rose is the key to the enterprise. His patter is smart, his timing perfect, his rapport with the crowd a conspiracy with its voyeurism. This is comic book Artaud. The theatre of cruelty, he wrote, was the truthful distillation of dreams, the obsessions, the savageness, the fantasies, the utopian sense of life and objects. Get to see Jim Rose if you are ever visiting Heaven, Antonin, he’s one of yours.
The Adelaide Review, June 1993, p.40 .