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Zippo’s ringmaster Norman Barrett |
Circus’s brave face is more than just an act
The enduring appeal of the big top has survived TV and panto and now faces the challenge of the digital age. Simon Wroe joins the circus as it prepares to come to town
IN uncertain times, everything becomes a circus. People talk of the political circus, the media circus, the three-ringed circus of marriage (engagement ring, wedding ring, suffering) and the clowns who keep each mad mechanism turning.
Oddly enough, the denizens of Zippo’s Circus don’t see the funny side of this comparison.
“If you had chaos in the circus it would not work,” snorts Anna Konyot, a “white-face clown” who acts as the foil for her comic clown husband, David.
“I was having a discussion with a member of the audience, a professor in Oxford, and he said if the world was run how a circus was run it would be a darn sight better place,” adds Norman Barrett, the 73-year-old ringmaster. There may be some mileage in the theory but it is impossible to tell with Barrett, whose gag-a-minute schtick (“As true as I’m riding this bicycle”) never stops.
It is the morning after Zippo’s opening show in Twickenham. Two clowns, an aerialist, a juggler and the ringmaster are discussing last night’s highs and lows around a formica table out of the morning sunshine glare. The smell of sawdust and horses is heavy in the air; inside the big top the sweet wrappers of a thousand excitable children have not yet been cleared away.
The encampment is quieter now, but it is far from silent. Delivery men come and go and the drum rolls have been replaced with a plaintive hammering, which on investigation turns out to be a man whacking a nail into a piece of wood to give the illusion of working. In a few days the circus will be on the move again, to Hampstead Heath next week, then Finsbury Park.
“Someone has to go over to the church on the other side of the road and find out what channel they’re on,” says Barrett gravely. “The radio mic is the same. I opened with ‘Ladies and gentleman’ and I got ‘Dearly beloved brethren’.”
Like many of the 30-strong troupe, Barrett has worked in circuses all his life. He and his peers have seen the ebb and flow of the institution’s popularity, and they have seen the threat to their livelihood shift from TV and panto to iPods and health and safety; but they remain unbowed.
“We’ve survived everything,” proclaims Mr Konyot, of the Konyot Clowns, whose family have been “entertaining for 800 years”.
“Circus always adapts. We survive for the simple reason that when an audience walks in that tent they’re watching history, because this show’s different every day.”
The show is “doing very nicely thank you” despite the recession, even if the circus owner, Martin Burton, has all but disappeared under a pile of risk assessment forms for every single horse, pony and grouchy budgerigar called Peppy featured in the show. A yellow clown car had to be decommissioned because the doors would no longer fall off. Worst of all, trapeze “flyers” have occasionally fallen from a great height, though serious injuries have been avoided in recent seasons.
Burton is a “josser”, someone who was not born into the circus, who started his career as a school teacher. He set up Zippo’s in 1986, naming it after his fire-breathing stage persona, Zippo the Clown.
He was forced to hang up his size 20s after hospitalising himself during his routine (he inhaled when he should have blown) but continues to oversee the action from his “office”, a trailer in the far corner of the encampment.
The intransigence of family circuses stagnated the business in the 1950s and most successful enterprises today are run by jossers like Burton, although performing pedigree is still a point of pride: Mrs Konyot claims nobody can remember a time when her family did not belong to the circus.
Hollywood likes to portray the circus as a surrogate family, but performers dismiss this as another myth – “we’re not travellers or hippies either”, says Mrs Konyot. Instead, they see it as a village, complete with its disparate characters, love affairs and petty feuds.
There’s Pepino the clown, real name Raoul Jiminez, who was “one of the greatest flyers the world has ever seen” until age brought him back to earth; Goa, a Rastafarian acrobat and front-of-house manager from Kenya who makes the audience limbo under a pole; 22-year-old Tristan Lewis, aka Mr Twix, the son of a Daily Mail journalist who ran away to join the circus; and his girlfriend Disa Carneol, 21, who started on trapeze when she was 10.
The horses are handled by Tom Roberts, “a very private man who keeps himself to himself. If horses could talk he’d have a great conversation.” In the other caravans a gang of stocky Columbians wait for their big moment on The Wheel of Death, and there’s a professional dancer who is either “mysterious” or “retarded” depending on which clown you talk to.
From February to November this strange village will travel the length of the country, making people laugh come hell or high water. The Arts Council does not fund them, the animal rights protesters or “anti’s” often stand outside and abuse them, and accidents can and will happen.
“It’s a hard life,” says Barrett. “In our business you never know when it will stop or when you will not get work. This is the wheel of life. The wheel turns and that’s how people make a living. And what you do is what you are.”
Around his lips, the faint trace of a smile still hovers.
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