‘It’s a family drama,” says Yaron Lifschitz. “It’s kind of a minor key, gently comic version of the Oresteian trilogy. Without the dismemberment and murder and purple carpets.” Lifschitz is talking about his latest production for Circa, the acclaimed Australian contemporary circus group. Is it a Greek epic? A state-of-the-nation drama? A searing emotional journey? Nope, none of those. It’s a fun, family circus show based on that cheeky cartoon character Shaun the Sheep.
You might not think the antics of an anthropomorphic flock of farm animals can be compared to Aeschylus, but Lifschitz sees characters bound together as family with different personalities, friends and enemies, having to work out how to live together. Shaun the Sheep has been a huge success since the character originated in Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave in 1995. The stop-motion series launched in 2007 has been broadcast in more than 50 countries, and had multiple spin-offs including two feature films and another one in the pipeline.
Still, a kids’ cartoon is not obvious subject matter for Circa, who over the last 20 years have become known for highly skilled, atmospheric shows, a “stripped back and edgy” aesthetic, as Lifschitz puts it. They do awe-inspiring acrobatics with a classy choreographic sensibility – at this year’s Edinburgh festival, for example, they performed in Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice, to much acclaim.
But when artistic director Lifschitz caught wind of the possibility of working with Shaun the Sheep creators Aardman Animations, something about it made sense. “We found we were like-minded spirits,” he says, over video call from Australia. “We’re people that are a bit left of centre. They’re from Bristol, we’re from Brisbane, and they both have a similar offbeat weirdness about them,” he says. “They were a little company that could, and did. And we’re a little company that could. And did.”
Lifschitz has made shows for children before, an audience he thinks is not always well served. “I think a lot of theatre for children is frankly pretty bad,” he says. “It’s got a bow around it; it tells nice stories that end really beautifully and in no way reflect the real world.” You’re not going to find much tragedy in Shaun the Sheep, but Lifschitz loves the mischief and anarchy of it, the characterful flock at Mossy Bottom Farm, plus sheepdog Bitzer, and the antagonist gang of pigs, who get up to various high jinks, all the time pulling the wool over the farmer’s eyes. “It’s no different to Kafka in some ways: the absurdity and the rules of being in a society,” he says.
Anyone who’s seen the cartoon will know that there’s a lot of physical humour in it already, the sheep balancing on each other’s shoulders, attempting daring escapes, catapulting one another over fences, that sort of thing. So there was plenty to work with. Lifschitz and his team got deeply into the animated series. He shows me a spreadsheet with every episode listed, hundreds of them, and good jokes and scenarios pulled out. They have turned that into a full-length show, the first half like a series of episodes, the second a more full-blown circus performance. It uses some clips from the TV series, alongside impressive tumbling, juggling and aerial skills. In the 80-minute show, the mood is a bit dreamier than a tight seven-minute episode, but it has plenty of gags.
Making this show was the first time Circa had dealt with the licensing and IP of a well-known brand, and all the specifications that go with it. An example: each sheep character has their distinctively googly eyes on the headpiece of their costume. “There are 48 eyes, and each one of them gets individually approved for size and position of the pupil,” says Lifschitz. “Which is brilliant, you know, because they care about their work.” But it did mean there were some “robust” conversations, he says. (A scene where a sheep shears herself like a stripper was dialled back because it was too sexy.) Aardman care about rigour in their storytelling, which Lifschitz admits, “is not really my thing”. Lifschitz’s work is generally more abstract. “I think circus can get away with a lot of looseness, because the show is pretty exciting as a default setting,” he says.
He’s tackled narrative before, but found himself watching things in “double focus”. “I was trying to convince myself that I believed this was about Peter Pan, or climate change or whatever, as I was watching someone do something skilful and cool, and I thought, ‘Couldn’t we just build our art from “skilful and cool”?’ I had this kind of Heideggerian phenomenological experience,” he says. “I just want the actual experience, the feeling of this thing, not what it’s ‘about’.”
On this show, however, Lifschitz appreciated how exacting Aardman were about the art of storytelling. “They were punctilious in how things were set up and explained in a way I didn’t need,” he says. “But it was a really good lesson for me that dramaturgical rigour can be a good thing.” So there you go: Greek drama, Kafka and rigorous dramaturgy. And you thought it was just a funny cartoon about a clever young sheep.
• Shaun the Sheep’s Circus Show is at Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 4 January
