Once a year, every year, my mum asks whether it’s too late for her to pack her career in and join the circus. I’m holding Gifford’s Circus responsible. Back in 2000, the touring company began life on the village greens of Gloucestershire. Ticketholders would decamp onto their local commons and enter a world of kitsch comedy and glittering glamour. Since then, the circus has become a fixture on grassy patches across the UK, but remained a Cotswolds institution. I went to my first Gifford’s, a show I was too young to remember, in 2002. But those mid-Noughties circus trips underscored my childhood and have called me back year again and again.
If you’re not a regular Gifford’s-goer, chances are the word “circus” conjures images of moustache-twiddling ringleaders, huge-scale audiences and questionable animal practices. Gifford’s has banished all of that. It’s more of a musical – and a particularly intimate one. Each year has a new story, a theme and loose plot that’s weaved throughout and links the acts. There’s a live band, who sometimes play covers, sometimes perform entire original soundtracks; the show ends with a giant musical number involving all the acts. They all give it a go, although the show’s choreographer Kate Smyth tells me it’s the least favourite part for many of the performers. Even tightrope walkers get nervous sometimes.
Gifford’s has always had a theatrical slant, but it was cemented by the arrival of director Cal McCrystal in 2012. McCrystal is a comedy director, best known for his work on The Mighty Boosh and the National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors. He’d never heard of Gifford’s, but quickly fell in love. “I thought I’d do three years and they’ll probably have had enough of me by then,” he jokes. “But the shows are actually, in some funny way, getting better and better every year.”
I meet McCrystal at Gifford’s base in my hometown of Stroud in the final days of rehearsals for Carpa!, this year’s Mexican-themed show. Sequins are being stitched, one by one, onto leotards. Large set pieces are sawn out of wood. In a full-size practice ring, a horse canters in circles (horses are the only animals used in this show). While everyone rushes around him, McCrystal seems surprisingly calm, decked out from head to toe in company merch. He was brought into the company by the late Nell Gifford, who founded Gifford’s with her then husband Toti. That dream of running away to the circus? She’d actually done it – before going on to read English at Oxford, naturally.
The circus they conceived of harked back to the art form’s more traditional, less flashy roots. Its home was in small communities around Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties, but in the decades since, it’s grown exponentially. This year’s tour is five and a half months long and sees the troupe tour Wiltshire, Oxford and London. You’ll probably spot a celeb or two at the Chiswick shows, with Helena Bonham Carter and Phoebe Waller-Bridge known to attend. But the circus has kept loyal to its roots, and still returns to the country villages it’s always played.
Gifford’s is an undeniably middle-class affair – but it’s still daring. From the outside, you see a small, vintage-looking tent. Yet inside, a rich magic is conjured. Troupes of acrobats hurl themselves in the air (usually directly at each other), knives whisk past ears and people dance on their hands, often on the back of a moving horse. Tweedy the clown (a local legend) keeps the show ticking along, traipsing across the stage with a pet iron on a string called Keef.
This year, Tweedy has a new clowning companion in the form of Mexican comic actor Adriana Duch. In fact, there’s a Mexican theme throughout the show. It’s the company’s first full-capacity show since the pandemic. Last year, it performed to a reduced audience, while in 2020, guests had to be socially distanced for the restriction-compliant show The Feast at their in-house restaurant. Those experiences brought the cast together, McCrystal says – but God, is it good to be back and able to do things properly.
From the costumes, sets and glimpses of rehearsals I’m shown, Carpa! is Gifford’s at its Gifford’s-iest. Tweedy, McCrystal says, has been “dying for a really wrong, strict domineering boss for ages because it makes him look more stupid” – Duch brings that in spades. Tweedy, dressed in blue dungarees, a snapback and with a Joker-branded bag, giggles at this. “I can get more sympathy,” he replies, a glint in his eye.
New acts join and leave Gifford’s every year (although there always seems to be a different Cuban acrobatics troupe), but everyone becomes a part of the family. The area behind the tent is a maze of caravans and trailers where the performers live on-site. That close proximity forms bonds. I watch McCrystal present Adriana with a copy of Jane Eyre in Spanish; she seems genuinely touched.
This year, in keeping with the show’s theme, nearly everyone comes from Spanish-speaking countries. Backstage, it’s the unofficial language – even if McCrystal only speaks un poquito. The performers work together and help out in each other’s acts, while everyone mucks in when their time to move to a new venue comes around. But it’s also fun – when the Gifford’s crew get on it, they go hard. “Acrobats, they really are serious partygoers,” McCrystal says. “When I wake up in the morning, sometimes the party’s still going from the night before.”
McCrystal and Nell used to brainstorm ideas for next year’s show together, but when she died of breast cancer in 2019, it became his job. It was actually her niece Lil Rice, an astonishing Cyr wheel performer who has previously appeared in the show, who suggested Mexico. McCrystal was instantly sold. It was there that he first met Duch in 2001 and he wanted to capture “the excitement and chaos and joy and fun of Mexico” on stage. Duch’s own background was in mask rather than clowning specifically. Still, she picked it up easily. “With the mask you play a character, [but] with comedy it’s more like you being you,” she says.
This year’s show, McCrystal says, is “an English take on Mexican culture”. The company strives to include the cultures it’s representing and obviously, they would never make Carpa! without Mexican cast members. But the performers come from around the world – last year’s show was about Ireland and, McCrystal points out, even the two Irish dancers came from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Belarus respectively. They’d tried to get Irish dancers who were actually Irish and in lieu of that, McCrystal nicknamed the Belarusian dancer’s home nation “Bally Loose”.
Nobody goes to a circus expecting naturalism or historical reenactment, but I wonder how the creative team balance high-camp comedy and theatricality with authentically depicting these cultures. “I always have to think about cultural appropriation,” McCrystal says. “It’s a difficult time, particularly making comedy, because something that was completely acceptable 10 years ago, now people find unacceptable.”
McCrystal describes it as a “renewed sensitivity”, although he’s keen to clarify that “it’s probably not a bad thing that we all have to think a bit more carefully about the stuff that we do”. Gifford’s though, he says, has always operated in its own space. After all, there’s nothing even close to it on the market. “Gifford’s is a real bubble actually and there’s probably things, more traditional English comedy [that] we can do here that you might not see in the West End or on TV any more. But I think the shows we do here are always kind.” He laughs. “Even if there’s something a bit naughty, it’s always big-hearted and warm.”
‘Carpa!’ runs at Chiswick House and Gardens until 27 June and across the UK until 19 September
