words: MAB JONES
Royal Welsh College, Cardiff
Wed 2 May
★★★★☆
Bringing circus acts to the stage takes a lot of balls, if only because juggling them can be so precarious a task. The line between mere physicality and succinct storytelling can be a tricky tightrope to tred. In Heist, however, Citrus Arts have managed this breakneck balancing act, with brilliance and bravado.
Telling an incredible tale – a mission to kidnap the ‘reservoir dog’ (!) – the team take inspiration from classic heist movies, in particular (and unsurprisingly) those of Mr Tarantino, in a variety of ways. The music is straight from the screen, and the company skillfully use the audience’s associations with these scores to create character and plot, all with a deliberate tongue-in-cheek humour. The characters are familiar, with names such as Brains (a geeky scientist played by Heist writer John Norton) and Canary (performed by Charlie Marey, a very skilled acrobat but who also, to me, looked a lot like Barney Rubble). The plot, too, is the usual plan-pull of-imprisonment parable, complete with twists, turns, and exciting bursts of action.
However, there are plenty of touches and techniques that make this much more than your usual, well, heist. Onstage scaffolding is skillfully scarpered up, strung down from (a la Mission Impossible), and utilised as a window with, at one point, some well-done use of shadow and silhouette. A fun Pink Panther-style spy sequence had the cast holding up dummy heads to represent characters. And them, of course, there are the circus elements themselves. In particular, I enjoyed the white ball juggling sequence, with ball added to ball to a tense, ticking/heartbeat soundtrack. Incredibly tense, and amazingly skillful, with an enthusiastic round of applause from us at the end.
In short, this was a very enjoyable show, for both adults and children alike – another balancing act that can often falter. But, none of that here. If this show was a somersault, then it landed perfectly on its feet. A very good feat indeed.
