Clown Show is, as the name tells us, a show filled with old-school clowning comedy, which is an unusual fit for the King’s Theatre stage. Yet it’s also, playing on the slang term ‘clown show’, an example of something run by incompetents going utterly, farcically wrong. In creator, director and ensemble performer Geoff Sobelle’s view, it’s clear that the example he finds most grandly illustrative of this tendency is the United States of America.
A graduate from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to the Edinburgh International Festival, for which he’s produced the previous big hits Home and Food, Sobelle brings a quirky alternative perspective to the bigger festival. The King’s’ stage is decked out like a grotty old circus marquee, on whose central platform eager but comically effective clowns shamble on and off, trying to put on a show.
This studied haplessness is part of the regular usual clown bit, of course, and there are some brilliant pieces of physical clowning comedy here; one clown playing an increasingly forlorn tune as his piano is dismantled and removed around him, for example, or another being ‘fired’ by canon into the royal box, her celebratory speech of amazed, affirmative platitudes moving beyond the hilarious into the bizarre.
With a comic riff on the gun-happy US cowboy show, and diversions into jazz and Dylanesque troubadouring on the soundtrack (the latter played gorgeously by Elvis Perkins), it’s a comic play which perfectly balances the sublime, the ridiculous and ultimately the thoroughly purposeful.
Clown Show, King’s Theatre, until 30 Aug, 3pm