It begins like a children’s Halloween party, the lights low with figures clad in scrappy white sheets whose frilly ankle socks can be seen beneath. Boo! they say, creeping up beside us to make us jump. Wooohooo! they shout, wibbling their arms under the sheet to make us laugh.
This production is built on such ostensibly artless silliness but beneath it is carefully considered grotesquerie and high camp comedy. Directed by Nicci Wilks, it comes with plaudits from Australia and takes the idea of child twins celebrating their “death day” in the afterlife as its macabre premise. They are played with hyperactive menace by circus performers Olivia Porter and Jarred Dewey, both amazing acrobats and impish physical comedians who behave alternately like aggressive automatons, possessed rag dolls and child poltergeists.
Dismembered body parts become their playthings and the acts take us through the typical fare of a child’s party, from creepy clowns to balloon animals and a game of pass the parcel. Comic violence is set against a soundtrack encompassing the tinkly tunes of a children’s wind-up box and the shower scene score in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Much of the cod spooky visual effects are delivered through Richard Vabre’s jagged lighting design.
The act switches between dark slapstick (the twins bash, kick and garotte each other) to distilled moments of stunning circus spectacle such as a trapeze scene by Dewey, dressed in funereal weeds, variously turning balletic shapes in the air and also contorting limbs in tremulous comic mourning (“It’s tearing me apart,” he says, with legs in aerial splits). Porter performs a bewitching juggling act and another scene sees the pair balancing on each other’s limbs in choreographed acrobatics.
They keep such “wow” moments short on the whole, and this seems like an emphatic deconstruction of the mannered poise of circus, with the focus on ghoulishly black comedy and childlike riotousness.
At times, the performance seems to give way to shapeless play but this messiness is very much part of the grand plan. Far removed from the slickly polished displays of much contemporary circus, it is all the more inventive, surprising and spirited for it.
• At Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh, until 27 August
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