The Stage

Trash City Show

Published Friday 9 April 2010 at 12:00 by Liz Arratoon

It’s loud and large-scale and if you’re mashed off your face in a Somerset field, you’d probably think it’s spectacular, but Trash City’s show makes a dismal and dispiriting opening for CircusFest, the second biennial Roundhouse circus season.

Aya Husni Bey and H Plewis in Trash City at the Roundhouse Photo: Tristram Kenton

This is another post-apocalypse, dark angel type of production, with heavy rock, robots, vampires and a stripper, plus clusters of dishevelled fairies and ugly sister ‘clowns’ cavorting about on Block9’s massive and impressive bombed-out city set.

It is opened by La Clique baritone Le Gateau Chocolat as the Brain. He starts off swathed in white net and later crams his amplitude into a purple glittered Babygro for a rendition of Prince’s Purple Rain.

Performance artist Ryan Styles plays the aggressive Lost Boy and burlesque clown Fancy Chance the sex-starved Bin Witch.

But is there any circus? Yes. Trash City does have aerialists on ropes, wires and bungees, though they mostly just dangle. The exception is Empress Stah who, suspended from her signature chandelier, here draped with Miss Havisham cobwebs, shows off her style with some risky (no lunge) toe, waist and heel hangs. She also had a neat trick, if you find the macabre appealing, of syringing out her own blood and drinking it.

But Trash City feels like being trapped in an old Toyah Willcox video, without excitement or thrills. If the Roundhouse is serious about being known as the UK’s leading contemporary circus venue, it must come up with something better.