The Circus at Olympia
THEY are all here again—the trained horses and the clowns, the lions and the trapezists. None of the turns are the same as last year except the Rivels trio with its No. 3 so touchingly like Charlie Chaplin, and yet they are unchanged. The horses are plump as Christmas geese, plumes on their heads and their heads arched with the tight bearing-rein. They weave figures and stand up on their hind legs. The lions roar and get up wearily on little painted stools to form a pyramid of tawny fur and sad eyes. Two lions at the top of the pyramid stand face to face : the bigger one licks the face of the slightly smaller one in a reassuring way. The man keeps cracking his whip. It is infinitely pitiful. So is the baby elephant with a diamante collar and a huge pink bow, who rides a bicycle and stands on two legs with a flag gripped in his delicate trunk.
Useless to remember how often we have been assured that the animals are trained by kindness and enjoy showing off. The point is not that, but that elephants with pink bows and lions posing like artists' models are inappropriate. A lion's business is to seek his meat in the wild places, and we humiliate him and ourselves by making him ride horseback and do drill, just as much as lions would humiliate us could they catch us, put us in cages, and sit round watching us roar and tear at huge pieces of raw meat. Would they grow sentimental over us, crying " Oh, how sweet ! " and " Ah, the darlings ! " patronizingly, and thinking how little lower than the lions we were ?
Far more enjoyable in any case are the legitimate amuse, ments of the circus—the clowns and the acrobats. The Rivels trio is superb, and " Charlie " a comic genius on gigantic feet. What an inspiration are his rubber socks, like a surgeon's operating gloves, with long flaccid separate toes to them, and how desperately he seems to hope at each futile effort to climb up to the bar and be as good an acrobat as his orange-clad companions ! How frightfully funny it is when he fails in a different way each time !
Barbette, a lovely blonde dressed like Gaby Deslys, is a demon on the slack wire and the swinging bar—and what a terrible shock she gives the audiences at the end of her turn I Let no one say what it is ; the secret is well kept. There are fifteen agile beings in white tights who take one's breath away flying round in the air suspended by their teeth or their toes only. There are no nets to catch them if they fall. This makes it all the more thrilling, and a good many of the audience entertain a curious faint expectation of tragedy. There are tiny ponies, tiny people as supple as they are diminutive, a giant, Japanese acrobats, yet another ingenious trio of comics. There are performing dogs who seem to enjoy themselves immensely, and outside the circus itself there are booths and palmists, steam organs and shies. If only the lions, the horses and the elephant were banished, it would be a paradise of enjoyment.
IRIS BARRY.
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