Cirque du Soleil: Amaluna at the Royal Albert Hall
reviewed for The Times, 20th January 2016
Photo credit: Stephen Berkeley White
Female Prosperos are in fashion. Cirque du Soleil doesn’t quite offer us Helen Mirren, but the latest extravaganza at the Royal Albert Hall constructs a narrative loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest to anchor its usual blend of omni-tumbling acrobats, breathily amplified massage music and Strictly Come Dancing Spandex.
The goddess-feminism is gruelling: this is the island of Amaluna, ruled over by women and by the Moon, your overpriced programme will tell you, amid the glamour shots and heavy-duty plugs for corporate sponsors. As long as you’re not expecting top-tier textual analysis, the narrative nicked from Shakespeare adds welcome pace and tension to a thrillingly executed evening of entertainment.
The scene is Miranda’s coming-of-age ceremony. She’s grown up on an uncivilised isle, ruled by her mother. Which is the problem of female Prosperos in a nutshell: they allow an actress a rare chance to tackle a meaty Shakespeare lead, but too often act as a pastel-coloured plaster for Prospero’s crabby masculinity. When he’s not being bookish, he’s sadistically torturing his colonised slaves in the name of moral discipline. If Cirque du Soleil’s go-getting, comic-book-heroine Prospera is now vanquishing patriarchy, how do we feel when a troupe of feather-haired, ululating red “Amazons” happily bow down before her as a god?
None of that will stop you gasping and gazing at acrobats tumbling from the skies. Tuguldursaikhan Nenzen even flips around on a couple of bamboo-thin canes while dripping wet with water. As Miranda, Nenzen is torn between hunky Romeo, a prince shipwrecked upon the isle, and the seductive lizard man Cali, a companion of her childhood. There’s a deep understanding here of the tension between Ferdinand and Caliban in Shakespeare’s original. It’s an eroticism that chills the hairs on the back of your neck: will Miranda choose the earthy sexuality of primitive experience, or civilisation, monogamy and romance?
Cirque du Soleil is an inherently conservative franchise, so perhaps the answer isn’t surprising. Yet there are real risks and thrills before we get there. The second half is less gripping, with longer set-pieces and a solo balancing act that seems to go on for ever. Yet the technical expertise — from design to physique — remains impeccable. Enjoy it.
