Review: Head First Acrobats in GODZ – some serious circus skills lost in campy schoolboy humour
Graham Watts sees GODZ with Australia’s Head First Acrobats – four good-looking, fit guys, but the jokes wore as thin as their thongs.
| Title | GODZ |
| Company | Head First Acrobats |
| Venue | Peacock Theatre, London |
| Date | 11 June 2025 |
| Reviewer | Graham Watts |
Creating theatre through circus skills is nothing new under the proscenium arch and certainly not to the Peacock Theatre, where it is a regular item. But it has never been played as camply as in this London premiere by these Australian visitors. In GODZ, Head First Acrobats appear to have developed a unique brand of playful homoerotic and highly acrobatic mythical mirth on Mount Olympus. It’s something like acrobatic Chippendales meeting Up Pompei!
If anyone is looking for a show to round off a hen night or an office party, then look no further because GODZ is just the ticket. Four good-looking, fit guys, wise-cracking jokes as they portray Apollo, Dionysus, Cupid and Hercules while performing injury-defying acrobatics and then becoming butt-naked statues, hiding their meat and two veg behind large saucers (or perhaps they were discuses) while making sizeist comparisons about the length of their appendages.
The four Gods are introduced in a voiceover, as if statues in the kind of recessed alcoves where one might find a reliquary from the Grand Tour displayed in any English Stately Home. Thereafter, punctuating the largely unconnected circus skills, the sketchy narrative seems to largely concern Hercules and his banishment to the Underworld by the unseen Zeus.
Although the campery brought out the necessary raucous laughter from an audience clearly in thrall to the Frankie Howerd style of comedy, it also masked some serious circus skills. As the Roman interloper in this otherwise Greek deity, Cupid (Liam Dummer) showed some mighty skills with aerial straps; Jordan Twartz belted out an impressive solo in diabolo juggling (for the uninitiated its like spinning a bobbin on a string, exceptionally fast); as Hercules (also the work’s narrator of sorts), Callan Harris exhibited secure one-armed balancing skills, on top of a tower of chairs and a free-standing ladder; and – bringing dance into the equation – Thomas Gorman performed some impressive breakdancing skills, including countless head spins on a moving platform, thus contradicting the Olympian legacy of Raygun to Australian hip-hop!
The first half of the 75-minute show was hallmarked by impressive hand-to-hand acrobatics, including a human tower that would have rivalled the best castells in Catalonia, and Harris’ balancing act on top of chairs apparently haphazardly placed on top of one another culminating in a handstand several metres above the stage. These are not new tricks and I have seen similar on this stage, many times, but what was impressively innovative was a confidence that nothing would go wrong – usually one sees some strong men hovering around at the foot of these “towers” (whether people or chairs) to catch a falling acrobat if the trick goes awry; but not with these Aussies who just let each other get on with it!
In a sense this apparent macho bravery and disregard for personal safety was also a sign of the problem, which is that with just four performers there was not only no scope to have such safety standby but also no opportunity to diversify the routines. I kept expecting some variety, perhaps in a grandstand finish but was left wanting more.
The quasi-erotic side was embellished by some precision whip-cracking and incongruous aerial nuns (Dummer and Twarz) but was mainly concerned with the four guys standing naked on pedestals, covered by sheets, and as these were removed one-by-one they kept the full frontals at bay by virtue of those carefully-placed plates, which – in a variation of the old towel trick – were shifted quickly, and largely successfully, to keep the penises out of sight, although leaving four sets of buttocks routinely in full view.
The show suffered from its setting and the consequent detachment of circus performance from the audience sitting back in the stalls or up in the circle. There is a reason why circus is best performed in a big tent, seen in the round, and the Peacock doesn’t provide for that democratic intimacy.
The humour was in the style of a moving seaside postcard, best enjoyed after a few too many drinks, and whilst sober old me did happily succumb to a few belly laughs, the repetitive schoolboy humour of sniffing a backside or a discarded thong wasn’t particularly funny the first time around and grew even less so as the joke wore as thin as the thong itself!
Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA). He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.
He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv. He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.
