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NoFit State reviews
Big Top thrills on Treasure Island Oxford Mail 15/8/97
Splice the mainbrace and shiver my timbers - NoFit State Circus has sailed into town hot on the trail of pirate booty. This animal free company is in the Big Top till tomorrow with two hours of thrills and fun in Treasure Island. It's a version that even creator Robert Louis Stevenson would find hard to recognise in terms of plot, but most of the familiar characters are there. You might raise an eyebrow though to find that pegleg pirate has changed sex and is now Long Jane, played by company founder Ali Williams. As ever with NoFit, the story is just a convenient peg on which to hang their display of circus skills. With all these ropes and rigging around, be sure there is plenty of scope for aerial excitement - as well as fire juggling, tumbling and some clowning.
Some cracks take account of adult taste in humour, as when Toby
Philpott's
Captain
Flint (a parrot, you'll remember) muses Monty Python-like over a dead
seaman: "That pirate is deceased; he is no more; he has passed on..."
Great! ©
Chris Gray 1997 Oxford Mail
Circus acts find the treasure South Wales Echo 1/8/97
If you associate circuses with exploding cars, performing lions and horses in hats, the NoFit State Circus may disappoint. For the past 12 years, this Cardiff-based outfit has been turning all our preconceived notions about this much-maligned art form on their head and brought the Big Top firmly into the 1990s. So, don't go expecting to see wild animals forced to perform wretched little stunts.
Mercifully, the only acts losing their dignity in the remarkable, stunningly designed and marvelously musical version of Stevenson's classic piracy yarn are the cast who somehow manage to work a succession of tumbling, high-wire and pratfall routines, plus some astonishing fire-juggling, into the story. Admittedly, the plot is occasionally sacrificed for the sake of the tricks and some barbed political comments are like the girl on the flying trapeze, over our heads.
But these are minor gripes. Ultimately, Treasure Island is just that, a real gem in the stagnant waters of children's theatre.
© Martin Wells 1997 South Wales Echo