Fringe review - Juggling lessons with Circus Geeks: Beta Testing, Udderbelly
31/05/2015
Circus Geeks: Beta Testing. Photo: Joe Clark
Three juggling geeks and a hour to tell you about juggling, that's the sort of premise to the Circus Geeks: Beta Testing show.
They are certainly skilled, as you'd expect for a show on the South Bank, but this isn't a show with knife juggling or any other dangerous sharp objects it is about sheer complexity.
However, as the Geeks kindly point out, often the audience don't really appreciate the more complex juggling tricks - it's just a blur of balls/batons/hoops. So they've drawn a graph to show you. Lines representing each juggler rise and fall depending on the difficulty of what they are doing, as they run through a sequence of different tricks. It's a nice, quirky little feature to one of their set pieces.
There is often a slightly serious or rather geeky edge to what they do and in the main it works although I could have done with a bit less the talking in the first third of the show - it can sound a bit too geeky and isn't as funny as it is perhaps intended to be.
Circus Geeks: Beta Testing has some great bits and is just about fun enough to fill an hour. It is family friendly and you certainly come out with a better appreciation of the skills involved but compared to other stuff I've seen on the South Bank it doesn't quite have the same wow factor.
The show runs at Udderbelly, the big, purple, upside-down cow behind the London Eye on the South Bank until June 23.