La Meute (The Wolf Pack)

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You might guess early on from the terry-towelling nappies the ‘wolf pack’—la meute—wears, that if you’re after highbrow you’ve come to the wrong big top.

This six-strong all-male ensemble is definitely more Jackass than Circa, but stick with their chaos and sado-buffoonery and you’ll be rewarded with some unusual derring-do. Much of the show is based on tumbling and pranks, and while an elaborate human version of the game Mousetrap does bring chokes of shock, their trump card is definitely the Russian swing. This bit of kit might look like something from a scrapyard but it has the power to catapult its participants right to the roof and there is great beauty in seeing each performer’s individual flipping, diving style.

There’s no pretence here to anything more than showing off; in fact the moment one man begins singing a soulful gypsy lament, he is swiftly shut down. They play rough and look as if they are having a riot, sometimes so much so that you wonder whether an act has just gone wrong, or if they would even care if it did.

La Meute isn’t a polished show and some of the humour falls wide of the mark. Also the balancing-on-another-man’s-balls act gets a bit repetitive after a while. But this pack captures something about the recklessness of old-world circus that in a marketplace saturated with slick polish has its own raggedy charm.