Archaos
Wayville Showgrounds

Any display of pyrotechnics depends on precision and planning, and Archaos, Cirque Revolutionaire from France, has an especially fearful symmetry to it. What makes this show remarkable is the intelligence that drives it – hardly a gesture or joke is without reverberation, every sign is significant. Archaos offers many signs for the times.

Not that we are talking dry semiotics here. Stunt riders hurling 44 gallon drums, vandals with chainsaws, pyromaniacs and menacing clowns, spin in and out of a circus ring that reeks and rattles with internal combustion. Like the truck in Spielberg’s Duel, the very machinery is on the rampage and the centre cannot hold.

This has its own exhilaration. Circus has always offered danger and Archaos performers fuel the reckless wishes of their audiences. No lingering drum rolls, no hushed silences, they fly pell-mell into the thick of things – their carelessness becomes ours too. This is the theatre of cruelty with a monkey wrench in its hand.

But there is counterpoint also. The ambling jongleur with an umbrella takes a shower in the middle of the mayhem, a circus hand, like one of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, shyly joins the trapeze act and then cannot contain his own celebrity. Contortionists in glasswear perform with lyrical, vulnerable grace, while flowers are sniffed and exchanged in the rites of traditional clowning. If some of it looks like Beckett, it is because this is where it came from in the first place.

Propelled by incendiary guitar riffs and sinuous reed lines, the Archaos company flounce, scowl, smile and shrug at an audience that hardly knows where to look next. The pace is hectic, the changes swift and the meanings pile up relentlessly. A juggler hounds his partner like a Pozzo to Lucky, the stiltman’s tango with the lady monocyclist turns to murderous frenzy.

No aestheticised fetishism here, rather, a procession of black images are unleashed like vice figures while the pure-in-heart scamper up into the ropes, woodsprites waiting for a storm to pass. Intensely, theatrical – the fire-eating scene explodes into a Meyerholdian foundry with angle grinders and rotating dervishes. And, imbued with a simple lyricism, Archaos acknowledges the double self in harmless, fearless celebration. Appropriately this production has been assisted by Circus Oz whose radical vision, like that of the splendid Archaos, has done much to restore to us an elemental theatre with the power to amaze.

“Off the Wall” The Adelaide Review, No.74, March, 1990, p.32.