The affable debut show from Barely Methodical won the British troupe this year's Total Theatre award for circus, and there is plenty to like about it. Louis Gift, Beren D'Amico and Charlie Wheeller explore male friendship through an engaging mix of acrobatics, hand to hand and the Cyr wheel. It's a very neat blend of physical heroics combined with something more vulnerable; handshakes turn to backflips, and its turns out that, while sometimes three's a party, it can also be a crowd.
It is great to see a young British company attempting to make thematic work, and not just doing tricks, and there are passages here when content and form are indeed in perfect harmony. Sometimes it feels a little over-padded, but there are some good moments, particularly when Wheeller's isolation is made so physically manifest that it actually hurts to watch. There is sometime about his self-absorption on the Cyr wheel that speaks to the inner loneliness of the young male. Rivalries and male preening also find a physical language in the relationship between Gift and D'Amico, built entirely on mutual trust but revealed as something more competitive, too.
It would be nice to see this being developed further. The show's homoerotic undercurrent, though undeniable, goes almost entirely unacknowledged. Instead, these youngsters concentrate on getting their shirts off and pleasing the crowd, which they certainly do. Nothing wrong with that, but these lads are slightly selling themselves short, because the show is at its best when it is not revealing flesh but trying to employ circus to reveal what it feels like to be a male today. There are some misjudgments, including a dubious final image, but this is promising stuff from a company that could go far.
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