Lexicon takes place in NoFit State’s familiar silver and purple spaceship tent, but unlike previous shows staged in this space, such as Tabu and Bianco, it is not a promenade piece – we are seated in the round (a full 360 degrees round). There isn’t a sawdust ring, but the centre circle is sawdust coloured. You can almost smell the elephants…

Pioneers of the UK’s contemporary circus scene, NoFit State have decided, after 30 years, that it is time to go back to their roots. Or rather, to circus’s roots. Back to its childhood, you could say. So in Lexicon we have a tented circus show that references and plays with the tropes of traditional circus, whilst retaining its contemporary knowing edge. But no, there aren’t any real elephants, only metaphorical ones, to quote NoFit State’s co-founder and artistic director Tom Rack.

The structure of Lexicon is that of a traditional circus show – the aerial and other equipment-intensive acts balanced with a number of floor-based turns: juggling, fire, unicycle or merry clowning acrobats chattering in a mix of European languages, or a no-language grommelage, in homage to the great Auguste clowns such as Charlie Cairoli or Coco the Clown. It is particularly lovely to see a comic three-man Cyr Wheel turn, and Luke Hallgarten’s pants-on-fire juggling act is a winner. A traditional circus skill we don’t see that often in contemporary circus is foot juggling – Rosa-Maria Autio manages to honour the tradition whilst giving it a modern feel, in her lithe limb-stretching duet with an armchair and a number of circular cloth ‘discs’.

But being NoFit State, there are also unexpected moments of great skill and beauty of a different sort – a lone performer in a party dress and platinum wig sitting in the circus ring playing harmonium; a hand-balancing act from Mathieu Hedan that becomes a shadow theatre piece when set inside an enormous black-gauze tube and lit by hand-held lights; a Chinese Pole routine from Luca Morrocchi on a piece of equipment that extends the pole upwards into a spinning metal ‘cage’, the lighting cast downwards through the structure making a kaleidoscope of spinning wheels on the ground.

Ah yes, wheels! Bicycles play an important part in the show. There is a marvellous collection of trick cycles or oddly shaped vehicles that appear a number of times in the ring, circling merrily around. A Penny Farthing, a double-decked scooter that forces its rider into the splits, and a daft floor-hugging go-kart. King of the cycles is Sam Goodburn. He gives us the trad whip-yer-trousers-off unicycle act, but later in the show updates with a clever twist as he gets dressed into evening wear whilst cycling, transforming from schoolboy geek into prom queen’s dream date.

The bicycles are part of the schooldays trope that runs throughout – with echoes of everything in the sepia-tinted coming-of-age cannon from Le Grand Meaulnes to Laurie Lee. This works well much of the time, but as is oft the way with these large-scale NoFit State Circus shows written and directed by Firenza Guidi, a narrative suggestion or theme set up at the beginning of the show – in this case, adolescent innocence and longing, played out over a spectacular set of moving school desks – ebbs and flows throughout the piece, sometimes to the fore and sometimes forgotten about. It can be hard to mould all the acts that you need to fit in with a given theme!

Talking of acts: we haven’t yet mentioned the aerialists and wire-walkers. Fabian Galouÿe performs an elegant straps act, Rosa-Marie Schmid gives a great show of feminine strength on double rope, and Vilhelmiina Sinervo is both clever and a comic delight on the slack wire. But the star act is undoubtably Lyndall Merry on swinging trapeze – he’s a performer I’ve long admired, and is supremely elegant as well as highly skilled. He’s also the rigging designer – which in a show as complex as this one, is quite a job in itself.

All of this physical skill and wonder is accompanied by the marvellous live music of composer David Murray and the team of musicians, most of whom get drawn into the physical action at one point or another. And when they do, it is the movement direction of Joe Wild that steers the action into a series of lovely and lively tableaux. I say ‘accompanied’ but often it is more than that – a truly interactive and responsive play between music and physical action, for example when a performer is perched half-way up a scaffolding tower strumming a guitar, or a solo mouth organ tune accompanies a Chinese Pole act. Murray and his musicians plunder the world to give us jungle drums for a whip-cracking act with human tigers and lions; a mournful, heartbreaking lament that has echoes of Georgian or Bulgarian polyphonic song; and a number of gorgeous soulful numbers with echoes of American jazz classics.

At two and a half hours, inclusive of the 20-minute interval, the show feels a little too long. I find myself thinking (somewhere around the two hour mark) that an outside dramaturg is needed to come in and get tough with the director/company. There are some odd dips – for example,  after Lyndall Merry’s spectacular swing over the audience’s heads, which feels like it should be the last, or at least the penultimate, act. There is sometimes unnecessary repetition, or a good scene morphs into something less interesting – for example, in the aforementioned big black gauze tube handbalancing scene, in which the beautiful shadow images give way to a mediocre projection onto the gauze that my companion described quite aptly as looking like a 1980s screensaver graphic. And there is at least one major scene that really doesn’t fit – a very pretty but superfluous aerial hanger act with crinolines and parasols which although a visual delight feels like it has crept in from another show. There is so much spectacular circus work and wonderful comic moments in Lexicon – there is just a little too much of everything, and a bit of trimming and honing is needed. It is a new show, and I am sure it will, in time, transmute from the good show it already is into the excellent show it is destined to be. But hats off to NoFit State for getting this far – it is a mighty achievement, and certainly not as easy as A-B-C. A show full of delights that both honours and gently usurps circus tradition.

A handsome, rugged-looking young man, with a cowboy-country tan and tousled hair, his black T-shirt streaked with rust, lifts a glass water bottle to his lips and drinks slowly and purposefully. It’s a wonderfully theatrical moment. The theatre continues. He stands, poised, and looks over at the big rock almost-perched on an even bigger (human-sized) rock, held in place by a harness and iron chains, the whole thing hanging from a square-based pyramid (a pentahedron, even), the rusty metal of the structure the reason for the orange-brown streaks on his clothes. He and this large sculptural construct are circled by people, some sitting on a quartet of equally large rocks that mark the outer edges of the metal floor; some standing, and some lying on the beach half-watching whilst doing other things. There is, for example, a trio of teenage girls making their own small sculpture, pebbles and shells arranged into circles on the beach. I’m trying to avoid making a judgement on gender-specific activity, but the sight of these pretty young things in their white crop-tops and shampoo-scented long hair making delicate patterns with their sea-shore treasure up against this young man with his big rocks and his clanking metal chains and poles invites such thoughts…

The sculpture cum work-space is sited beautifully on Brighton beach between the sci-fi silver mast of the much-derided new tourist attraction, the i360, and the decaying hulk of the West Pier, the remains of which sit stranded off-shore – two visual icons that could be seen as representing the past and the future of Brighton. The remnants of what were the supports of the shore-side end of of the pier now stand alone and useless on the beach – great columns of rusted metal that complement and create a dialogue with the metal of the sculpture. The large grey pebbles of the beach are small echoes of the great big grey boulders of this work, which is called A Piece of Two.

The young man – Dutch rock-balancer and sculptor Nick Steur – ponders, counts on his fingers, seems to be making calculations, then moves back to his construction. Another 15 minutes go by – I’ve been here in the blazing sunshine for an hour and a half, and time seems to be moving slowly – and the giant rocks have now been manipulated to a point where Nick considers that they are balanced. There are murmurings in the crowd. ‘I’ve been here three hours, I could watch him all day!’ says the women sitting next to me on the rock, and a man behind us calls over to his partner, saying ‘Come back, he’s done it!’  The three girls look up from their own art-making – it’s hard to tell if this is approvingly but I suspect they are playing at cool – and a family of four arrive all in a rush and ask what’s going on. An usher tries to explain and they shrug, take a quick selfie, and walk off… Ah, the joys of outdoor arts!

Then begins the painstaking process of removing the harness and chains that were holding the top rock in place before the point of balance was reached. Much nail-biting (for me) moments of hooking and twisting and pulling and clunking later, the rocks are standing alone in the centre of the pyramid, and there is a round of applause from the audience.  Nick holds up his hand (another perfect theatrical moment) and says: ‘I’m not finished yet. I’m never finished…’ As I move away, he is starting to rearrange or perhaps dismantle the metalwork structure. Apparently, the process is continuous. Everyday he spends six hours (give or take a few tea breaks) here, and as soon as one balance is created, it is time to move off into the next challenge, using the same or other rocks, with just a few archaic pulleys, chains, metal poles, and bolts as tools.

I was pleased to see a conclusion of sorts, a point of balance reached, but do take on board that, like Sisyphus, Nick Steur’s task of manipulating his boulders is endless… Art. Life. Sculpture. Theatre. Big rocks or little rocks, Nick Steur is your man. Entrancing stuff.

When you book a train seat, do you like to face forwards or backwards? I always opt for backwards. Forwards and you are hurtling into the future, trees and cars and people a blur as you pass them by. Backwards and the past recedes from you, stretching out into eternity. You have time to take it all in; to contemplate your relationship to the world around you.

Rear View builds on that idea. Literally – they’ve built a special open-air bus in which all the seats face backwards, this marvellous beast created by veteran street theatre company IOU’s director David Wheeler, in collaboration with maker extraordinaire Andy Plant. The show’s audience are taken on a journey through the streets of Blackpool or Halifax or Norwich or, in this case, Brighton accompanied – not quite led, not quite followed – by a young woman, who we take to be the ghost/alter ego/younger self (pick your metaphor) of an older woman looking back on her life.

There is spoken text – beautiful and evocative poetic text, written and performed by one of two young women artists. On my trip, it was Brighton born and bred performance poet/playwright Cecilia Knapp, who alternates shows with Jemima Foxtrot. The text is conveyed to us through state-of-the-art headphones and (we presume) a bluetooth connection. Then, there is the sheer pleasure of travelling through a city on an open air bus, facing backwards, feeling the breeze on your skin, smelling the ozone of the sea. And there is the marvellous framing of the landscape that occurs with each scheduled stop – and indeed at any moment on the journey. Everyone and everything becomes part of the artwork. A dissolute looking man stands at the gate of Sussex Gardens (where Lewis Carroll’s Alice first encountered the White Rabbit), looking pensively at his watch. Are we late? An elderly couple make their way painfully slowly along the promenade as the sun dips down over the sea: they are not arm-in-arm, they are struggling along independently, each intent on their own journey. A young couple are standing on a street corner, talking intensely, close to arguing. A mother pushes a pram with one hand, trying to text with the other. Meanwhile, our narrator – dressed in a very costume-y asymmetrical white dress, marking her out from the landscape as someone or something not quite here, not quite ‘everyday’ or of the present moment – stands leaning against the promenade rail looking out to sea, telling stories of the man in the bar who always asks her to lend him her ears for the afternoon; or peers into a Kemptown cafe window, remembering the woman who smelt of bleach, peppermint and liquorice Rizlas; or glances up at the bird perched on top of the gasworks tower in the industrial estate, whilst she tells us how and why she got her bird tattoo.

Framing is everything, which is why the show starts not on the bus, but in a makeshift art studio. We are invited into a life-drawing class and briefly instructed in the art of looking, sizing up, framing the figure (Cecilia in her white dress) – really seeing what is in front of us. This device, together with the choice to have the two performers alternating shows, is a handy way of making it possible for the company to run a number of shows in a day without too long a changeover time… I mention these practical dramaturgical decisions as a way of noting that IOU are one of the UK’s most experienced outdoor arts / site-responsive theatre companies, and these matters of structure and timing are something they have a lot of experience managing.

Talking of responding to site, we have an interesting situation here. The texts – each performer has written her own version – are a response to a brief to develop short poetic texts voiced as a fictional older woman looking back on her life, to be presented in a number of suggested generic sites, e.g. (and I am guessing here, I don’t know the brief): in an art studio, outside a cafe, in a run-down urban setting, in a place of natural beauty, near a postbox. The text thus interacts with the site it is placed in, staying the same in form but changing in resonance from location to location as the show tours. So there is a universality to the story (exploring as it does such everywoman experiences as self-image, being the subject of the gaze, the tide of memories as we age, losing people along the road of life through bereavement or other circumstances) and a specificity evoked by the text placed in that particular setting, with the audience’s relationship to the place another factor. Like many people on that bus, I have my own memories of and relationship with Brighton Marina, Kemptown’s vintage shops and cafes, and the seafront – and my own memories and imaginative wanderings worked in tandem with the text I was hearing and the sights I was seeing. Rear View is therefore a show that evokes and invites a complex relationship with site.

It is not a perfect piece of work (that would be asking a lot), but it is a very good one. My reservations include finding the music backing track (an ambient wallpaper-ish mix of piano and synth) a little disappointing – I get that the aim was unobtrusive ambient, but I find this sort of easy-listening synth-driven composition a little irritating, and found myself asking: where is Clive Bell when you need him most. But in the interests of fairness, no one else I have spoken to had this response; most barely noticed the music, feeling it blended in with everything else in a satisfactory way. There is also something about the way Cecilia was sometimes ahead of us unseen and sometimes behind us and visible that jarred slightly. I was particularly bothered by a scene where she got into a car that followed us. It took us away from the illusion that she was a ghostly figure who was haunting the spots that we arrived in, being there in place as we turned a corner, so that we encountered her in each new setting as a sculptural figure in the landscape.

But these are small details, and not enough to distract from my enjoyment of the piece. The bigger picture is that Rear View is a cleverly constructed piece that delivers a feast for the eyes and the ears, and a clever reflection on the constant play between perception, memory and imagination that informs all our journeying through life. It invites us to see familiar landscapes with new eyes, to reinvent the streets and sites we think we know. A major achievement for IOU, and a highlight of the outdoor arts programme for Brighton Festival 2018.