Thursday 17th until Sunday 20th December 2009 @ Bridewell Island, Bristol

I don’t think any of us knew what to expect from an LSDisney themed Acid Rock Panto but the ever elusive people who make up the Invisible Circus certainly like to keep us on our toes. We congregated in the bitter cold dressed as a Christmas tree (shh, don’t tell work), Mr Tumnus, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, Stitch and The Mad Hatter - a good effort for a Sunday night. I reckoned that if anyone asked I’d just say I was the Christmas tree from the end of Lady and the Tramp and wasn’t it supposed to be trippy?

Once inside, there were no immediate clues as to what we were there for. We waited a while for the doors to the main room to open. A woman sung about the possibility of the doors opening until they did so, a bit like a musical version of a space shuttle take-off. Inside everyone was asked to sit down. We managed to get some chairs on a raised area at the back – jammy – and my friend, Steph, found some safety pins to draw back the curtain and we were set.

As much as I respected my grandfather, I was forced to go to Panto in Leicester every year of my life before he died and there wasn’t much I less enjoyed than the cringe worthy Englishness of ‘He’s behind you!’ I was too young to appreciate any camp irony. Imagine then, what a revelation it was to be told to ‘Shut the fuck up’ as a reaction to that tired line.

Other highlights included the drag queen pretending to store the lost jacket up him/herself and my friend calling out ‘Crotch Pooooockeeeet!’ This was a panto I’ve waited all my Christmases for. The premise was that a rock dweeb with a Brum accent is searching for his jacket with 365 studs on it but one fell off. Pandemonium ensues. A lot of effort had gone into the show from the script to the costumes (particularly the dancers dressed as fry-up components). The band was fabulous, the camp was fabulous and the one liners were un-clichéd.

www.invisiblecircus.co.uk

Sophie Collard