Brisbane-based contemporary circus company Circa premiered  Peepshow in Lismore, NSW in March, 2018. The show by Artistic Director Yaron Lifschitz has since toured the world. Two Limelightcritics attended the opening at the Sydney Opera House this week – and had very different responses. 

Circa’s Peepshowat the Sydney Opera House. Photo © Prudence Upton

Kate Prendergast

★★ Circa’s Peepshow leaves this reviewer unseduced.

A peepshow is an invitation to witness, with presumably voluptuous and voyeuristic thrill, the salacious and forbidden. At Circa’s Peepshow, what audiences witness is something that an over-zealous, extra-flexible and uncertainly horny troupe of oddballs might have concocted at the back of a hired gym. How did it find its way to the Sydney Opera House?

Without flair, without imagination, and fatally without humour, this show mounts with taut glutes and some acrobatic skill a travesty in exposed flesh. Such was foreshadowed in the marketing video – even this fails to conceal how effortfully many of the performers move, the almost farcical lack of flow. The wobbles come early; the purpled faces soon follow. I think it was in...