Circus Incognitus

A clown's beauty is in his or her lack of shame at disguising tremendous skill in unattractive goofiness, purely for the pleasure and entertainment of others. And it’s this huge-hearted humility that runs through Jamie Adkins’s solo show, anchoring his precarious acrobatics and cartoon danger in childlike delight.

Dressed in shabby vintage dungarees with a semi-permanent worried expression—even when he’s gleefully acing a trick—Adkins leads us through an hour of graceful slapstick that echoes with the ghosts of silent movie icons. Chairs see-saw under his balance, citrus fruits become deadly missiles and ping-pong balls materialise with undignified timing from his gullet, before being incorporated into a juggling act that masks fiendish difficulty with silky nonchalance.

As with all good clown shows there are unconventional solutions to silly problems (how to create your own drum roll? Why, by tossing a nut onto a snare drum of course), rickety furniture and audience interaction. But there are also moments of great elegance, when Adkins duets with a bowler hat, tumbling it up his arms and across his back. Above all Adkins's persona has the sense of being recognisably classic while remaining remarkably fresh. There aren’t many shows you could comfortably take both your great-granny and your littlest niece along to, but this is one of them. And if the beauty of clown is in its humility, the beauty of the Fringe is in being able to legitimately watch a clown show at four in the afternoon.