Conor Pope joins the circus: I pine for the time a knife thrower drew blood from my neck

The last time I joined a circus I came millimetres away from disaster when I flinched at the wrong moment in a knife-throwing exercise. The small but significant drop of blood on my neck left me and the heavily tattooed circus performer who threw the six-inch steel blade just a bit shook.
The second last time I joined a circus I actually died, although in a metaphorical sense when, in full clown gear in Funderland, I failed miserably to make hundreds of children laugh despite some hilarious, if unintentional, tripping over those stupid shoes they make clowns wear.
You’d imagine then that I’d have had my fill of circus life. But when a message from my editor lands, offering me a chance to go to circus school, I can see my fingers type an enthusiastic yes while my brain is screaming a silent – but ultimately futile – no.
Then, before you know it, I’m defying gravity and bouncing high off a massive trampoline and towards what looks like a cold, hard and very unforgiving floor in a stadium that has made head and body injuries its business for decades.
But before all that there are introductions. I’m here with the cast of the Dream Factory, a new circus musical created by Cian Kinsella from acro-comedy outfit Lords of Strut, as well as Jennifer Jennings of Thisispopbaby and GMCBeats, producer of The Spark, the online hip hop sensation of the summer. As we sit in a circle in the National Stadium on Dublin’s South Circular Road, they tell me about themselves.
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From the elevator pitch I gather that the show is about a young girl called Breda from Ballyplastic who joins forces with a bee to take on an evil corporation led by a villainous chief executive whose greed and mania will otherwise destroy the world. Only dance can save the day.
As the performers talk, they make it seem like I’m not an intrusion on their busy day of rehearsals, which in my book makes them very good actors indeed.
I’m fidgety as we chat because I know this is by way of a preamble to my circus class and I know bad things happen at the circus. But I have no idea how bad it is about to get.
“Are you ready to sing?” says Jennings.
Sorry, what? Singing? In front of people? Not just people, professionals? Sober? At 11am?
That would be a hard pass – give me a deadly blade flying towards my face or a group of mournful children staring at me wondering when the funny starts any day. But my protestations count for nothing.
My genuinely held dream of a life in musical theatre, or indeed, any kind of theatre or performing art, was crushed 40 years ago as I sat small and shrinking behind a wooden 1950s school table on which someone had crudely drawn a deformed penis.
I was 13 and after a successful one-night run as Tiny Tim in a previous school’s take on A Christmas Carol I was smitten with the stage lights and the grease paint and the applause and wanted to be an actor. But then I was hauled out of my progressive coeducational community college by parents relocating to another part of Ireland.
In my first week in my new school – a not so progressive all-boys school run by unforgiving men in black – I went full of hope to the auditions for the Christmas play based on the life of Hans Christian Andersen. The audition was a simple affair. We were told to sing scales as a group, with those who failed to hit the right notes getting tapped on the shoulder and told to go home. I was tapped and that was the end of that.
But now here I am, expected to sing in front of some very talented folk.
I’m scarlet until Ruth Berkeley appears by my side. She’s a calming presence and guides me through an ensemble piece, which sees us sing about how dance will defeat the evils of capitalism.
Berkeley has performed in big musicals on the West End and elsewhere and had a role in the 2022 Disney film Disenchanted starring Amy Adams, Idina Menzel, Maya Rudolph and Patrick Dempsey, so knows her stuff. She says nice things about my efforts but I think we both know she’s being too kind.
“I ran away to the UK and got into a really great musical theatre college and have been really lucky with the West End, international tours, UK tours,” she says. “Ireland has the most amazing singers, storytellers, dancers and we get all these great tours from overseas but where’s the home-produced stuff, the original music? It’s here. This is it. We’ve this great cast of acrobats, puppeteers, singers and it’s just fab to be at home doing this.”
The song rehearsal ends and I hear a sentence that makes my blood run cold. “It’s time for dancing,” says Jennings.
I have to shimmy and shake and make a pig’s ear of it. But the dancers are lovely and don’t make me feel bad. They don’t need to. I’d love to be able to dance but – apart from shuffling like an early 1990s indie kid to Radiohead or Nirvana or dancing drunkenly to Mr Brightside at weddings – I’ve never set a dance floor alight.
So, the less said of the dancing the better.
It’s nearly time for the circusing, but before that, Aoife O’Sullivan, who plays Breda, tells me more about the show. “It is saying take a look at this crazy, crazy world we’re after building,” she says. “But we’re not just saying look at all the terrible things. Talking about climate change and the environment can feel suffocating and leave people thinking how can one person make a difference but that’s central to the show, which says it is okay to laugh and to sing and dance and we will find a way together.”
Berkeley nods. “Breda is seeing this world where we’re all obsessed with buying stuff and no one is interested in singing and dancing.”
Múinteoir Ray, also known as Ray Cuddihy from RTÉ Home School Hub, plays the Bee. “It is not remotely po-faced,” he says. “It’s good guys against bad guys and the songs and the humour are amazing.”
It’s also the first circular economy musical produced here, with sustainable practices central from repairing, reusing and upcycling over 85 per cent of set materials, costume and props to sustainable codes of practice throughout.
It’s “an ecological parable focusing on greed, consumerism and environmental destruction,” says writer Cian Kinsella. “It allows us look at the effects of an extractive economy [and] gives us hope that we can find our way out of it and inspires us to engage differently with nature. It’s about empowerment and agency.”
Suddenly I find myself standing on a trampoline. One of the show’s acrobats, Nat Whittingham, has taught me a couple of tricks and I start bouncing, tentatively at first. Then higher and higher or at least I feel high. Suddenly I’m flying. I’m like a God. I’m like Icarus sailing towards the sun.
Then I fall backwards to do my trick. I would have bounced off on to the floor had Whittingham not saved my life.
I’m unsteady on my feet as I pass Kate Finegan, another acrobat who’s weaving in and out of a metal hoop high above out heads. She makes it look effortless, so much so that I want a go.
She takes me through the routine and gives me instructions, but they seem complicated and I’ve lost her after the first sentence but nod like I know what she’s talking about. Eventually I grab on to the hoop and hoist myself up. I manage to get my leg over and wobble in and out of the hoop in a fashion that is far from fluid.
My turn as an acrobat is over but for Kinsella it’s just starting. He is looking forward to the show starting in the Civic Theatre in Tallaght in preview on September 21st and as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival from September 25th.
“As soon as you start talking about global warming over consumption, biodiversity, it can seem boring, but we’re doing comedy, so first and foremost it has to be funny. We are always like, ‘Are we going too long without a gag?’ Ultimately this is about family who’ve forgotten how to get on with each other. They’ve to learn to become friends again and listen to each other. So really, it’s about human interactions and everybody can follow that.”
The circus musical Dream Factory, in association with Civic Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, is at the National Stadium in Dublin September 21st-October 5th. dublintheatrefestival.ie