L'Enfant Qui...

Spending an hour with Belgian company Théâtre d’un Jour feels about as close as it’s going to get to stepping back in time and watching a band of travelling players heave up their tent to perform. Their style of storytelling circus is honest and plain; they don’t pause for applause, they don’t style or pose. Their clothes are grubby with mud from the floor of the big top, pitched in Randolph Crescent gardens, where soil is scattered along with leaf mould.

The tale is simple. Sculptor Jephan de Villiers has inspired an autobiographical piece about his own childhood. Through a forest landscape littered with tree stumps, fizzing with menace, a puppet boy makes his own fun, picking up objects, stealing others and dipping into his own deep, dark imagination.

Here lie melancholy fantasies of men with axes, a three-storey tower of people, and a pack of furies puffing balls of smoke-dust. It’s a child’s view of things and, as such, things are liable to change in perspective and nature. The creatures that are fearsome one minute become friendly the next. People rabbit stories to us in multiple disorientating languages. There’s a randomness to the boy’s imagination and nothing is particularly harnessed to what has come before it.

L’Enfant qui… isn’t a perfect show, but it has the feel—like Villiers’s sculptures—of being both organic and beautifully strange. And the acrobatics of cellist Florence Sauveur playing Bach’s 'Cello Suite No. 1' will stay in my mind for a very long time to come.