Review: CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: CORTEO, Royal Albert Hall

A spectacular that puts the “fun” into funeral, Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo is their finest London outing in over a decade. 

This isn’t a new show having debuted in Montreal in 2005 but, compared to recent outings which have been more abstract or cerebral, it is a breath of fresh air. It’s no secret that, at least financially, the Canadian pioneers have had a bumpy time of it over the last decade. Founder Guy Laliberté walked away a billionaire after selling 90% of his stake in 2015 and his successors expanded the company through acquisitions like The Blue Man Group. That led to mounting debts and, even before the Covid crisis closed down theatres, Cirque found themselves in the red to the tune of almost a billion US dollars. 

The pandemic-related closure of their venues hit them hard and led to 95% of their staff being laid off. By November 2020, there were new owners at the helm as Canadian investment company Catalyst Capital Group took over. While many of their touring shows like Corteo (Italian for procession or cortège) are still trotting around the globe decades after first opening, their latest one Songblazers (based in the world of country music) was retired only a few months after opening last July.

Meanwhile, in another sign of belt-tightening, The Blue Man Group’s decades-long runs in New York and Chicago have been shuttered and both will close by 2 February. In London. the company's plan to turn Shaftesbury Avenue’s Saville Theatre into a dedicated 400-seat performance space remains in limbo.

Despite - or maybe because - the fact that their current shows are light years away from its street busking origins, Cirque shows come with weighty expectations. Each production has had millions invested in it, pulls together a cast of top-notch acrobats from around the globe and operates at a physical scale that has little in the way of competition. 

Ironically, for a show all about death and the afterlife, it is bursting with life. Mauro the dreamer clown (Stephane Gentilini) has died and, now surrounded by angels, envisions the kind of carnival his circus friends are holding to mark his passing.  Whether what we see is all in his imagination or not is deliberately (like Mauro much of the time) left up in the air. It’s not the most promising of premises but it is enough to hold together a series of enchanting pieces.

From the initial aerial sequence which sees four female acrobats swinging around on huge chandeliers, Corteo certainly has the wow factor but it has so much more to offer. Rather than the usual experience of having the action happen “in the round”, there is a traverse set design. Sitting opposite each other, the audience is split either side of a stage which stretches across the hall in a format that has never been seen at the Royal Albert Hall for a Cirque show. 

The biggest takeaway here is that, for once,  the clowns are actually entertaining. Instead of having the usual gibberish-spouting minions that would struggle to amuse a five-year-old, director Daniele Finzi Pasca turns the spotlight on what has been the company’s chief weakness. A giant clown (Victorino Lujan) stomps about the stage while the tiny Clowness (Valentyna Paylevanyan) runs around and (with the aid of a few giant balloons) floats and bounces around the audience like a beach ball. Apart from rare lapses back into tiresome tomfoolery (for example, when Clowness is romanced in a hammy version of Romeo & Juliet), this is very much an upgrade on the usual shtick.

Overall, Corteo is a far more cohesive and engaging affair than we’ve seen at the Royal Albert Hall for over a decade. There are always going to be sections which are far more about showing off supreme talent than anything even vaguely related to the plot and it’s hard not to have your breath taken away by the high-speed tournik display on horizontal bars or the fluent flips off the teeterboard as acrobats twist and turn through midair. There are, though, far fewer of those here.

Mauro is a constant presence, either riding a bicycle overhead while wearing huge wings or on the ground as he walks around remarking to himself in effusive Italian or speaking to others in stilted English. Whether they are from the Shakespeare canon or real-life people like Silvio "bunga bunga" Berlusconi, having Italian characters played on stage by actual Italians is still something of a rarity in the UK and Gentilini plays the deceased clown to perfection, working hard to tie together the more fantastical aspects back to the central narrative when he’s not atop a high ladder.

Aesthetics aspects like props and costumes are as beautiful as could be expected given the huge sums involved but the live music only adds real flavour on a few occasions. The simple narrative is enough to sustain our interest without being overplayed. Corteo, if anything, serves as a throwback to the peak of Cirque du Soleil and a reminder of how it came to be a byword for modern circus.

Cirque du Soleil's Corteo continues at the Royal Albert Hall until 2 March.

Photo credit: Andrew Paradise

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