Circa: Wolf
Performers: Circa
Venue: The Lafayette at Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows
Date and time: Friday 21st August, 6:20pm
Ticket price: £29.00
Reviewed by: Sarah Turnbull
Rating: ★★★★★ 5/5
Circa return to Edinburgh as certified Fringe favourites, and Wolf shows exactly why the company has been thrilling audiences for two decades. It’s circus sharpened to a point: a pack of ten in Libby McDonnell’s slick, form-hugging costumes surging onto the stage, fixing the room with an unblinking stare before tearing into an hour of gasp-inducing acrobatics set to DJ Ori Lichtik’s relentless, primal pulse. Director Yaron Lifschitz frames the wolf as a symbol of the untameable self, and you feel that feral energy from the first collective inhale.
The ensemble moves as if connected by sinew and instinct. Pairs snap into perfect sync, flipping between playfulness and aggression; at one point, a single body calmly bears the weight of four others, stacking in a configuration that seems to ignore the usual terms and conditions of gravity. There’s dance here as well as gymnastics, a constant slippage between styles that keeps the eye hunting for the next surprise. Casual strength is the keynote: impossible balances, hand-to-hand towers that sway and settle like a living sculpture.
The visuals are as precise as the bodies. Lighting carves the space into planes and shadows, sculpting torsos and turning sudden silhouettes into looming, lupine shapes. Smoke drifts in layers, making entrances feel like materialisations; a figure emerges, panting, locking eyes with the front row as if daring them to look away. It’s eerie and arresting. Threads of puppetry surface too – a suggestion that the wolf might be snared – before the line snaps and the pack breaks loose again.
Circa are masters of pacing and set-up. Ropes drop from the ceiling for aerial sequences that spin into blurs; a vertical pole appears and, with one hand, a performer just hangs there, impossibly.
You can hear the audience hiss their breath and then hold it as the company set up the dare. The audience are a veritable symphony of gasps, groans and even a collective, “They wouldn’t, would they?!”
And amid the ferocity, there’s wit: a cheeky “third wheel” keeps trying to insert themselves into tidy duos, a playful undercut that gets a proper laugh without puncturing the momentum.
What impresses most is the illusion of effortlessness. The performers’ control over their bodies – the micro-adjustments, the silent negotiations of weight and risk – is complete, yet they sell it as instinct. That’s thrilling, but it brings the night’s only tiny drawback: they make it look so easy that, at times, the audience hesitates to clap, not sure if they’ve just witnessed the trick or merely the prelude to an even bigger one. It’s a luxurious problem to have.
Wolf earns its subtitle – circus with fangs. The chaos of the opening evolves into the cohesion of a pack, and the choreography surges with raw, shared purpose. Between the muscular score you can physically feel and the razor-clean stagecraft, this is an hour that floods the senses and then tightens like a snare.
Circa have always known how to dazzle; here, they also haunt. In a Fringe stacked with world-class circus, they’re still, for my money, the best circus act in town – and that’s in steep competition. Nobody else matches the technical ability on show. I’ve seen them for many years and will keep coming back.
★★★★★
