DANCE, PHYSICAL THEATRE AND CIRCUS

Casting Off

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139), until 28 August

Australian circus troupe A Good Catch brought two shows to Edinburgh this August: Zoё, an abstract exploration of the climate crisis that ran during the first two weeks of the festival, and Casting Off, the company’s hit show that first visited Scotland in 2018, which is on until the end of the month.

To be blunt, A Good Catch should have just done Casting Off for the entire month, because Zoё was awkward and underwhelming and this is anything but: it is a playful, poignant and ultimately spectacular show about inter-generational female relationships.

A Good Catch’s three core members – Debra Batton, in her sixties, Sharon Gruenert, in her forties, and Spenser Inwood, in her thirties – spend an hour performing various acrobatic feats and balancing acts using little more than a table, three chairs, and their highly trained and finely tuned bodies. It is really watchable, well-choreographed stuff. What makes Casting Off stand out, though, is the brilliantly funny chat Batton, Gruenert and Inwood have while they are performing. They bicker and banter like old friends – or, more accurately, like the grandmother, mother and daughter they kind-of are.

They play silly games, they get mad at each other, they take the piss out of each other, but always with laughter and love. Some of it is rehearsed – little songs and sketches full of wit and wisdom – and some of it is evidently improvised, and all of it gently explores – for want of a better phrase – the female experience.

It is that sense of humour that turns Casting Off from a good circus show into a great one, and it is always there, even at Casting Off ’s remarkable conclusion, when Inwood and Gruenet perform some spectacular, swinging stunts on the static trapeze, Inwood humming a happy tune to herself until she is out of breath. It is an amusing and impressive end to an amusing and impressive show.