The Circus

The performers in their diving suits will lower themselves into the glass aquarium…

Under water you will see a tamed shark. This is very dangerous. The aquarium could break and the water could fill the whole circus. But…no one will be disrupting us and that’s why everything will go well.’

The Circus, originally written as a puppet theatre play, explores what happens when a civilian appears in a circus and, as a result, disrupts the entire performance, leading to catastrophic consequences.

This is the first translation into English of Daniil Kharms’ absurdist comedy play, originally written in Russian, and will be the first showing of the piece on a UK stage. The play gives us a glimpse into the absurdist world Kharms created in his writings. What was seen as bizarre and ‘unpublishable’ work in the 1920s and 1930s; work which questioned the necessity of structure and authority generally, has now been deemed as a whole literary genre of its own.

Second year YEP Director show