The thing with the­atre is you have to make up your mind to go and not pre­var­i­cate, sea­sons are short and good shows sell out.  Down­stage has been hit­ting the sweet spot recent­ly with sell-out shows like Guru of Chai and the Sound­stage series that looks to become an insti­tu­tion.  If you are shy of the­atre and not real­ly sure what you would like you should con­sid­er book­ing tick­ets for Dead­ly now because you wont be dis­ap­point­ed and the sea­son ends 23 Octo­ber.

Dead­ly’s tagline is ‘cir­cus with bite!’ and the per­for­mance explores the arch of a rela­tion­ship using the 7 dead­ly sins as a device to draw us into the dark sides of a pas­sion­ate cou­pling.  It opens with a cou­ple devour­ing each oth­er, lit­er­al­ly bit­ing into each oth­er, they start out sen­su­al and become increas­ing­ly aggres­sive and demand­ing.  The audi­ence is nod­ding to them­selves, think­ing, “Ah, glut­tony — ticked that one off. Now, what were the oth­er dead­ly sins again?”

For­tu­nate­ly this is not a lit­er­al romp through the sins and you soon find your­self caught up in the sheer beau­ty and phys­i­cal­i­ty of these body artists, not car­ing if it is pride or wrath when the man writhes up the pole rag­ing and thrash­ing, curs­ing fate before slid­ing head first down the pole stop­ping cen­time­tres before the ground.   There are no har­ness­es and no safe­ty nets, plen­ty of the audi­ence  were left white-knuck­led watch­ing the cou­ple on the swing sus­pend­ed over the stage per­form­ing the pri­vate uni­verse of love with all of its suf­fo­cat­ing and some­times sloth­ful inten­si­ty.  If all this sound a bit, well, intense, nev­er fear — there is a lot of joy and a few laughs to be had.  The sulk per­formed as a yog­ic head­stand pro­duced a few sti­fled gig­gles of recog­ni­tion from the audi­ence and a blissed-out soli­tary swing while the sky rained gold flecks brought the audi­ence to ohs and ahs and a rolling swell of applause.    The music is also pret­ty diverse with some rag­ing out to met­al and some swing­ing to Nina Simone.

If you have dif­fi­cul­ty pic­tur­ing cir­cus as any­thing more than glo­ri­fied gym­nas­tics open your mind because the form is evolv­ing and Welling­ton has a thriv­ing cir­cus com­mu­ni­ty.  Down­stage has help­ful­ly put togeth­er a video pre­view for you to get a taste.