I have in the past been guilty of suggesting all Cirque du Soleil shows are the same, but the return of the insect-themed extravaganza OVO does in fact demonstrate the Quebecois circus giants are capable of change.
Specifically, the excruciating unreconstructed clown sections – wherein male flies rubbed their faces up against the boobs of a female.. ladybird? – have been significantly toned down and de-misogynised. Which is good! Aside from being outdated ’70s-style humour, it was a really weird thing to put in a show with a substantial family audience.
Anyway: OVO 2.0 isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly an improvement.
I mean, it’s basically the same as every other Cirque du Soleil show that comes to the Royal Albert Hall: about two hours long, with a visually arresting but not exactly vigorously realised theme (insects). You get about a third slightly ‘meh’ clowning, a third elegant but not really pulse-quickening acrobatics set to wibbly new age musicl, and about a third face-meltingly impressive, borderline superhuman feats of physics-defying extraordinariness.
If I was put in charge of a Cirque du Soleil show I would pitch doing one that’s entirely the latter category, but hey ho. The best bits of this Deborah Colker production remain very good: at the tamer end, a glow-in-the-dark diabolo section is a lot more haunting and elegant than it sounds. At the more ‘scrape your jaw off the floor’ end, the first half finale – in which teams of acrobats fling each other around at a great height – is phenomenal.
The rest is more acrobatically pedestrian, but there are some lovely, vivid costumes from Liz Vandal to compensate and a lush jungly overgrown garden set from Gringo Cardia. The insect ‘theme’ is vague: most of the acrobats doing actual acrobatics look like… human beings in lycra. But there are some nice, weird mantis costumes in the background, and Mateo Amieva’s vividly hued clown-fly looks good, even if the comedy ‘plot’ – involving some messing around with a giant egg – doesn’t go anywhere.
All in all, OVO is an absolutely bog-standard average Cirque du Soleil show: and that’s an undoubted step up on last time.
