Pros: Arresting images and dark humour. Cons: A clown in existential crisis inevitably produces a show light on belly laughs.~ For the first half an hour I was baffled. I’ll admit that I had been expecting more of a twinkly eyed, red nosed, falling-over kind of clown. This was a challenging work with striking visual images, but some of the staging was shabby and it didn’t hang together well. Russian actor Adasinsky’s company Derevo (it means tree) made their Fringe ...

Pros: Charming, hilarious clowns, who also happen to be virtuoso musicians. Cons: The section with the projection didn’t work well, and made the energy drop. The children in the audience are part of what makes a clown show, and this performance featured the rambunctious laughter of a little boy somewhere at the back, whose timing was perfect and brought the house down twice. The five clowns of Netherlands-based Wëreldbänd reacted with ready charm; in fact, the audience was part of ...

Circus rebels without a cause strut, preen and pounce on each other in this anarchic show. Exhilarating to watch, but the pace is uneven, and they seemed to lose the audience at times.

Hugely entertaining and superbly performed, this piece thoughtfully and poetically translates universal themes into the visual language of contemporary circus.

Pros: A perfectly executed adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, with endlessly inventive choreography and the best use of a vacuum cleaner you’ll ever see on stage. Cons: None – it’s a solid all-rounder. Have you ever seen a vacuum cleaner become a coat stand, a bar, a phone and a dog? All these are possible, and many more transformations too, in Our Man in Havana, by Spies Like Us. Here, the household prop, which is sold by a vacuum salesman ...

Pros: Great music and sound, riveting movement, a lot of vitamin C Cons: More guidance about context before the show would have enhanced the experience. We filed into the space as two performers (one male, one female) danced beside each other to the kind of insistent Dancehall beat that tempts surreptitious chair-dancing. Both were dressed the same, in clothes that hid nothing: fishnet body stockings, matching trainers, tiny nipple shields. Naked equals. The atmosphere was intimate but inward-looking, devoid of ...