5* REVIEW: Tweedy’s Massive Circus at RSC Avonbank Garden is genius, daft and the best fun you’ll have this year

Tweedy’s Massive Circus, Avonbank Gardens until 2nd June, then touring

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…”

THANKS Stealers Wheel but that’s quite enough about the impending general election. Mind you, it must be a tough business to be in right now. Clowning, I mean. What with all these politicians inadvertently joining the profession, hilariously peddling their blithering nonsense and making desperately transparent promises they have neither any intention, let alone the resources, to keep, you’d think being daft for a living might be, y’know, a wee bit passe.

Happily – nay, miraculously – not so. Clowning is alive and well and hitting the heights – and several other tender parts – thanks to Tweedy’s Massive Circus. Cue the audience: “It’s not massive! It’s TINY!!!”

Tweedy, for those unfamiliar with the feller, is the Cotswolds’ much-marvelled-at chief mirth-maker. He usually plies his trade as a principal member of Giffords Circus - which gets one or two sly mentions tonight – but this year he’s pranced out on his own, on the lam as it were, albeit accompanied by fellow doofus, the biscuit-munching Sam Goodburn, and the slightly – and I mean slightly – more sensible Reuben Greeph on piano and Loren O’Dair who sings and chides and speaks some French.

There is a plot of sorts – Tweedy has promised Loren (“Madame Latrine”) a bunch of acts who obvs don’t show and she, as the patron and financial backer, threatens to pull the plug on the ensuing fiasco. It’s fab. Tweedy is a baby and a vampire with cardboard fangs, every prop – be it a stepladder, a bunch of wooden bricks, a mess of metal hoops, a portaloo-turned-Tardis – a likely and oft dangerous disaster in the offing. There’s not a dull moment, no downbeat, Tweedy orchestrating the mayhem brilliantly aided and abetted by Goodburn whose juggling skills and getting-dressed-on-a-unicycle routine are pretty much astonishing. Oh, and mustn’t forget, there’s a dinosaur!

This is a show put together with all the love and confidence of a performer at the very peak of his powers; a joy from start to finish. No, sorry, that’s not strictly true.

It’s a joy even before it starts and for a good while after it ends as well. In advance of the opening fanfare we are treated to the spectacle of a piano being precariously manoeuvred up a flight of rickety stairs – pure Laurel & Hardy. And when the standing ovation’s died down and the finale’s done and dusted, there’s the cast outside the tent, posing for selfies, Keith the iron being taken for an evening stroll.

Not to make too much of it or anything but it does occur, as we exit back to sobering reality, what a pleasure it is to partake of an all-inclusive show that advertises itself as welcome to all-comers, “aged 3 to 93”. It’s a heartening rarity amongst all the divisive strictures currently being imposed not just upon the arts but on day-to-day life leading up to the election, where one party’s attempting to catch the young vote by dangling the bait of enfranchisement, the other scheming to woo all the oldsters by coming down on youth like a ton of bricks.

I mean, conscription? Come on, you’re having a laugh! What is it Tweedy’s so fond of saying? Oh yeah: what could possibly go wrong?