BUBBLY BATHTIME FUN TO WASH YOUR CARES AWAY
Soap (London South Bank’s Spiegel Tent) Verdict: Wear a mac! ★★★✩✩
THERE are only so many acrobatic feats you can get up to in a bathroom — and the acrobats, trapeze artists and bodybenders in Soap surely do them all.
This is a circus-style show with a lighthearted bathtime theme. The opening act, to operatic warbling, has five lithe performers appearing from five tubs.
Over the next hour there is all sorts of cleverness with bath towels, shower fixtures and water — plenty of that, to the extent that spectators in the front rows are given a plastic sheet to save them becoming soaked.
The Spiegel Tent is part of the Underbelly venue which in summer makes a great addition to the South Bank, near the London Eye. It has an agreeable festival atmosphere.
Modern circus, no longer being able to use animals, has become surreal and artistic. Why else would a formidably muscular chap do an exhausting routine of backward somersaults and singlehanded balancing stunts on the rounded edge of an enamel bath?
The show has three hunks — Moritz Haase, Anton Belyakov and Daniel Leo Stern — and they are superbly fit. In wet jeans, six-packs to the fore, they transfixed many of the audience. Three middle-aged gents in front of me kept nudging each other in astonishment at Mr Belyakov’s thrusting groin.
A mournful Iberian, Vanessa Alvarez, juggles towels and a guitar with her feet. Jolly useful. There is a sponge dance, a gargle- and- rinse musical number, a diva who sings bathroom takes on Handel, Beethoven and The Beatles (‘Let It Splash’), and a tiresome clown. No modern circus is without one of those.
Quite fun, but you would not want more than 70 minutes.