playful, impressive, and very enjoyable, but some unnecessary or overused aspects
The first half of Yaron Lifschitz’s Shaun the Sheep’s Circus Show is structured episodically, with short and fast-paced sketches about each of the characters. Up to the interval, there’s a distinct focus on physical comedy and prop-based gags. I particularly enjoyed the slapstick violence, like the farmer falling over and slipping off the stage, a sheep being run over by a tyre, people turning round and accidentally hitting each other with things like seesaws or pig’s troughs- a slapstick classic!
The performers were all great, especially their ability to portray emotions through, essentially, nothing but animal noises and gibberish. The synchronisation was always really impressive, and some moments made me wonder how they were even doing them.
The scene with Timmy and his mum was a tender moment of emotional contrast, and used audience interaction neatly; I also enjoyed the opening routine with the Farmer building up to the flock appearing.
The puns on the billboard screen were all funny, and I thought the paper plane prop becoming part of the animations and then going back to being a prop was great, but for the rest of the first half it felt like the screen wasn’t really used in any meaningful way.
I loved Jethro Woodward’s music, which switched between energetic, bouncier pieces (calling to mind a mix of mid-period Stereolab and club music) as well as more beautiful and tenser, more dramatic ones. I really liked some of the other audio motifs, in particular the use of the theme tune, although the lightbulb idea sound effect felt overused by the end of the show.
The lighting- designed by Jason Organ- often functions as a subtle contrast with the heightened performances and music. The cuts to black in the sequence with the dog and the postman are very effective at breaking up and subverting the episodic structure, previously reinforced by the lighting.
Similarly, the Bull felt especially powerful and intimidating when it first appeared, as the only part of the first half that interrupted the character-based structure of the different sketches. Unfortunately, this is lost in its reappearance after the interval, when it’s lost in all the other elements onstage.
In a lot of ways, the second half of the show is completely different. More focused on the overall story about the Farmer’s TV than on character-based sketches, it feels like much more of a full circus show than a piece of physical theatre, with almost all of the classic circus acts coming after the interval. This meant that the show felt unbalanced. For me, the pig trapeze and the first half of the juggling routine could easily have been moved to the first half. Because of this imbalance, I kept feeling in the first half like I was waiting for a spectacle that just didn’t come.
In the second half, the billboard, used to show the live facial expressions of all the performers, felt overused. The performers were constantly performing to the screen instead of the audience, making it distracting and unnecessary. The video game sketch with the billboard was also essentially repeated immediately afterwards by the performers.
The circus costumes at the start of the second half were gorgeous, but the brown tracksuits at the end felt a little out of place, as if they’d come from nowhere. I loved the hats and wigs representing the different characters.
I wish the performers had interacted with the stage more, especially with all the different levels, or maybe used elements of the set such as the billboard in physical ways, not just for the videos and animations.
Instead there was a focus on prop-based comedy, which was always entertaining, but the best moments were consistently when the performers used the stage to their advantage: rolling down the hill, the house being used as a hat, and the sequence with the dog chasing the postman.
The glow-in-the-dark juggling and hula hooping- another example of routines which used the stage to their advantage being the best ones- looked brilliant, but admittedly did peter out. This was also my feeling about the show overall: very visually impressive, but with an ending that felt a bit weak. Saying it was anti-climactic is maybe too harsh, but I thought the end of the first half was more impressive than the grand finale.