Clown Show (EIF)
★★★★☆ Disturbing fun
King’s Theatre: Thurs 21 – Sun 30 Aug 2026
Review by Hugh Simpson
Clown Show, created and directed by absurdist, illusionist American theatre-maker Geoff Sobelle and at the King’s for the International Festival’s last weekend, is a boisterous and deeply troubling reflection of all of our lives and times.
Commissioned by the EIF to mark 250 years since the founding of the USA, this production does not reflect a body politic in the rudest of health.
Clown Show. Pic Jess Shurte.
Sobelle is one of a group of clowns who approach timidly from the back of the auditorium, and it soon turns out they are the only ones left in a run-down circus big top. Their attempts to keep things going feature comic turns, music, stunts and other entertainments that start to go wrong, and the more they try to put it all back together, the more things fall apart.
Not that the clowns are malicious; indeed, they are childlike figures, craving recognition from the audience, desperate for the applause that they milk for far longer than is comfortable for anybody in an age of attenuated attention spans.
There’s considerable spectacle, much of it impressive and very funny – lop-sided musical turns, physical comedy and delightful homespun engineering. Many of the routines are deliberately prolonged long beyond their optimum length, which is both funny and ultimately deeply worrying.
There’s stilt-walking, sight gags, a human cannonball followed by a ludicrously over-the-top speech about self-help and self-actualisation, and a riotous popcorn-providing interlude.
mass shooting
But by the time a Western-themed song and dance number descends into a mass shooting, it’s clear that these people should not have been left in charge. That’s even before the killing of a bald eagle. And if you think that’s a stark metaphor, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Clown Show. Pic Jess Shurte.
Meruti Evans’s dilapidated big-top set, Suzanne Bocanegra’s costumes, Thomas Jenkeleit’s props and the puppets of Eric Wright and Julian Crouch provide an endlessly diverting and inventive visual spectacle. Evans also provides the lighting design, which (along with Tei Blow’s sound) gives atmosphere to a production whose technical demands are exceptionally high.
There’s excellent music written by Elvis Perkins, musical director Mike Dobson, Leo Gurevich and Gideon Irving. The disturbingly woozy folky songs of Perkins and Gurevich’s self-destructing piano are particularly noteworthy, but all of the performers contribute, including to a piece eerily reminiscent of the Bonzo Dog Band.
collective stupidity
The cast (all of whom are credited as co-creators) is completed by Sophie Bortolussi, Nikki Calonge, Domenica Fossati and Jenn Kidwell.
For all the protestations that this ‘isn’t satire’, the implication of the production is pretty clear. This isn’t the only time at this year’s Festival it’s been hinted that society’s death-spiral will end not with wilful wrongdoing but in a shrug of collective stupidity.
In the UK, we’ve already had one clown-like leader whose qualifications for power were nothing more than a sense of entitlement and a desire to bait the grown-ups. With probably more to come.
Running time: One hour and 45 minutes (no interval).
King’s Theatre, 2 Leven St, EH3 9LQ.
Thursday 27 – Sunday 30 August 2026.
Thurs – Sat: 8pm; Sat: 2pm; Sun: 3pm
Tickets and details: Book here at the EIF.
Clown Show. Pic Jess Shurte.
ENDS
