The Nose Dive Assembly review – a gen Z take on the trad touring circus

There’s a festival feel at a Revel Puck Circus show: the big top, the caravans and candyfloss, the sense of community. It’s like a gen Z version of a trad touring circus, with the young performers dressed in matching jazzy gender-neutral jumpsuits rather than leotards and spangles.

Inside the tent are some fantastic acts. There is supremely graceful hair hanging from Poppy Plowman (yes, that’s hanging from a rope tied to your topknot). Plowman glides in circles, cross-legged, serenity itself. There is an inspired take on the cyr wheel, providing a great example of how a simple twist – in this case suspending a stage in the air so that we get a double decker performance, with one person spinning on top, one beneath – can bring instant theatre.

And because this is a group that does not lack ambition, there is the country’s only female ”wheel of death” duo, performing in a contraption that looks like a 360-degree pendulum with two giant hamster wheels attached. When momentum builds, it’s as if the person reaching the summit has a moment of zero gravity, which is hypnotic to watch against the sounds of Laurie Anderson’s O Superman.

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But the Nose Dive Assembly can’t quite decide what it wants to be, dramaturgically speaking. There is a thread, continued from the company’s previous show, about fallibility, risk and failure – sometimes delivered through whimsical clown-ish linking sections, elsewhere in manufactured drama, and a sort-of-lecture about the art of hand-to-hand acrobatics. It is an interesting idea, because there are only so many things a body can do, and the art of circus is often about how to repackage and resell itself to draw us in. But it doesn’t make a convincing thesis. The tone shifts, and the theme disappears undeveloped. It would be better either to ramp up the narrative with conviction, or leave it out and shape the arc of the show with energy, mood and technical invention instead (which is something the second half gets closer to).