According to TS Eliot in The Waste Land, April is the cruellest month, but January is the month when my thoughts turn to the murder of clowns. The double whammy of the annual arrival of Cirque du Soleil combined with the London International Mime festival means that generally, by this point in the year, I am seeking professional help for my increasing homicidal impulses towards anyone wearing a red nose and trying too hard to be funny.
For the first 20 minutes of this show from Belgian duo Les Witloof I thought blood might yet be spilled. They wear their red noses as a badge of honour and they have little-boy-lost personas to go with their little-boy-lost clothes. It is all very sweet and whimsical as they play with a red balloon and have difficulty finding the right way up for a cardboard box. Anyone who hasn't yet reached double figures would probably embrace this playschool approach to theatre.
But although its running time is 75 minutes, the show is still at least 15 minutes too long. Yet there turns out to be wit in this witlessness and the performance gets better and better as the duo make increasingly desperate and ineffectual attempts to understand a world where gravity can be defied on a fragile house of cards but getting a glass of beer seems to require an act of God.
By the end I was smiling, not only because Les Witloof are gently funny but also because of the skill that goes into a show that sees life as one big - and not always entirely funny - joke. It is like a comic treatise on the absurdities of our attempts to make sense of a universe that bowls beer - and indeed tsunamis - at us from out of the blue. This is not side-splitting stuff, but it is a quietly enjoyable unpushy little show with a brain as well as red noses.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 08703 800 400.
