On the 250th anniversary of the founding of modern America, its descent into the ludicrous is highlighted by New York-based clown Geoff Sobelle and his company, in an Edinburgh International Festival-commissioned work, receiving its European premiere at the city’s newly-refurbished King’s Theatre. The company garnered fulsome acclaim in 2018 when they brought sold-out show Home to the International Festival, and again in 2023 with Food.
Although ironic on the surface, the subject of America’s decline – dragging the rest of the world with it – is appropriate for a clown show, with its suspension of seriousness: the artform that most honestly and effectively exposes the monstrous abandonment of common-sense that lies at the heart of the American narrative in 2026.
The Festival’s commendably insightful pre-show essay and interview explain how entertainment as satire stretches back through ancient history, and by using a space that allows the transgressive – mad hair, crazy costume – the clown is able to get under the skin of authoritarian power. This has often come at personal cost – for instance, in the decades following his masterful cinema parody of Nazi Germany, The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin’s egalitarian politics made American authorities sufficiently suspicious for him to be barred from performing in the US.
Sobelle, a trained clown, says that he was prompted to write this show after watching a 2024 tv debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump descend into an embarrassing parrying of pointless golf-talk, reminding him of the deep misgivings he and many others had long harboured about the nation’s foundations – built on stolen land, stolen labour, and its espousal and export of the most dangerous kind of greed. The current President, one fears, is merely a figurehead in a long-running corporate nightmare that is approaching its deepest point.
The circus big-top in front of us tonight – splendid enough to win applause on curtain-up – is the arena for this disintegration into chaos: the bleacher-like seats are occupied by somewhat grotesque puppets and it’s strongly suggested that something bad has happened and only the clowns remain, and with them in charge, disaster is clearly not far down the road (this, Sobelle explains, an echo of most Americans’ daily experience – forced to participate unquestioningly in the big doomed project by walking its treadmill).
The opening sung folk-lament reinforces this impression – the mood is gloomy, the faces gormless – but, hey, the show must go on and the clowns pick-up the only way they know how, entertaining us with their wobbly instruments, collapsing pianos, parping brass, contorted mimes, singing and dancing. With all the musical clown-ship you would expect, it’s spectacular and flamboyant, involving seemingly hundreds of props, on a circular revolving stage (a major prop-management effort, I imagine, for Tech Director Chris Swetcky and his team, to whom much credit is due). Some in the audience laugh instantly, some stay quiet, maybe having seen this kind of musical comedy-chaos before, or possibly mindful that we are to expect dark metaphors for the American implosion that is the show’s underlying premise.
That darker narrative takes a long time to become fully revealed however, delayed while the messiness is played-out in extravagant, zany show-numbers and set-pieces such as when a popcorn machine is wheeled-on, accompanied by its own silly wee song, and bags of popcorn are thrown or carried out to the audience. It dawns on me only gradually that this might be a representation of the distractions of America’s spangly over-plentiful consumerism – sickly candy for all. I wondered whether that’s what others are thinking, or is it still merely a disorderly musical circus-spectacle?
But the props get ever-larger and odd things begin to happen – a giant human cannon ‘fires’ a clown, who reappears in one of the theatre boxes an instant later (nice trick!). She embarks on a forceful, lengthy rant about self-belief in the face of doubters, that becomes lost eventually in the growing cacophony, as the players ‘lose’ their giant fabric earth-globe into the audience, where it rapidly deflates to flat. It’s noisy fun, but by now we are unsettled as the doomy metaphor establishes and tightens its grip.
The popcorn machine returns, but this time to explode catastrophically: the clowns have finally lost control, and begin to expire, one by one, the props of staged physical pandemonium now a sad, useless pile of post-apocalyptic junk, accompanied by the modern-day tone of a corporate phone-queue message repeating how wondrously important to them you are as a customer… until it beeps its last.
The players return to book-end the show with a reprised folk-lament: with music the mainstay throughout (all the performers display super-competent musicianship), an uncomfortable tableau of an irrevocably-doomed country has eclipsed the merry-making. The show is not a satire, as I had thought beforehand – no figure or signifiers of the US, such its national anthem, flags or the Battle Hymn, are targeted or ridiculed. It’s not a magic show either, although illusion and trickery play their part – but it is a demonstration of how music and clowning are among the few ways human beings can express, and encompass, both the shiny surface and the ugliness underneath it.
