Crash! A body lands from a height – it’s a wake-up start to the show. The body belongs to a young woman who seems a little bit dazed but OK, shakes her head a few times, tumbles with ease across the small stage. Then – jerk! Some kind of synaptic snap occurs, and she’s thrown into confusion. Where is she? She remembers crossing the road, her mobile vibrating, it’s her brother and she doesn’t want to talk to him, she finds it hard to talk to him, she’s bought some socks for her dad because all the ones he has have holes in them, people say he drinks too much, she can see this guy Gill who she likes. Her first thought is: someone has screwed up; her second thought is, oh it’s me that’s screwed up; her third thought is, I don’t want Gill to see this…

Jerk, presented by Australian circus company Casus, is a solo show performed by the extraordinary, awe-inspiring, ridiculously talented Emma Serjeant and expertly directed by British physical theatre luminary John Britton. Although in its early days as a show, it is already an outstanding piece of circus-theatre.

Creating good circus-theatre is an enormous challenge. How to weave narrative and circus skills together in a believable way? In particular, how to integrate circus equipment into that narrative? Jerk is a text-book example of how to get it right.

First, keep the narrative simple, poetic, a snapshot of one moment in time that explodes outwards into a world of possibilities – a short story rather than a novel. The story is not obscure – it becomes obvious pretty early on that our heroine has been the victim of a road accident – but where is she now? In recovery? In a coma? Facing the moment of death? It’s unclear – by which I mean unclear in a good way: there’s room here for the audience to be part of the creative process, to work at interpreting the story.

Rule two:  use the intrinsic qualities of the circus equipment to aid the telling of the story. Aerial equipment offers the play on fear of falling and crashing, so fall and crash; hand-balancing equipment is wobbly, so wobble and twitch; tiny hoops can contain and trap the body, so are an excellent metaphor for a body trapped in a nightmare physical experience.

Next, find ways to use skills that you have in an innovative way at the service of the story. Emma Serjeant’s huge arsenal of circus skills includes a command of the speciality nail-up-the-nose trick – here re-invented with other objects in a flashback party scene of drug-taking and puking that simultaneously evokes a suggestion of hospital breathing tubes and feeders forced into a struggling body. Clever, so clever!

Last but not least, remember that the audience is part of the theatrical equation. Emma, in character as Grace – the smart and pretty girl who is a successful photographer and whose idea of rebellion is leaving the dishes overnight – draws us into her story through direct address from the stage, and later leaving the stage to take Polaroid photos that capture the moment, reinforcing the core ‘snapshot moment in time’ motif running through the show.

Text is used beautifully, sparingly in the show – a mix of recorded and live spoken word. A concealed radio mic picks up words, breath, the sound of contact with equipment, this all weaving in and around an evocative soundtrack that is always in service to the physical action. Lighting design uses straightforward archetypal colour-association to add to the storytelling (and there really is nothing wrong with being obvious in these matters) – blue is cold confusion, red is a dreamworld of past memories.

It is really hard to fault this show – it feels raw and fresh, and its brand-newness is visible, but that is fine by me. It will no doubt grow and change through performance, but I hope it doesn’t change too much. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It runs for just under an hour and every moment feels vital, alive. As the show ends, I walk out into the Spiegelgarden, feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights, dazzled by this extraordinary experience.

Casus’s previous show Knee Deep was shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and currently (May 2014) is also presented at the Spiegeltent as part of the Brighton Fringe. Jerk is a radical departure for the company, a brave experiment that has paid off, and proof that circus and theatre can, in the right hands, combine to become a powerful force.

In the words of Irving Berlin: ‘Sisters, sisters – there were never such devoted sisters’. Amy and Rosana Cade are sisters, born exactly 22 months apart in the mid 1980s. One (Amy) is tagged – or perhaps I should say self-identifies – as a sex-industry worker, the other (Rosana) as ‘a lesbian with a shaved head and hairy arm-pits.’ They are both feminists. I am not sure why one woman defines herself by her job, and the other by her sexuality – but that is what we are given as our starting point.

But which is which? We first meet them in their underwear, identical sets of sexy black bits of string just about covering their modesty. They have identical make-up, identical high-heels, and identical silky long-haired auburn wigs. One is onstage pole-dancing; the other is weaving provocatively through an audience sat in a red-light cabaret set-up, finding volunteers (of either/any sex) who’d like a lap dance. Two chairs are placed onstage, two volunteers brought up, and the instruction is given in chorus: hands here, no touching, just leave the stage when the music finishes. Cue bump and grind – a full striptease and then some. They start out identikit, but as the ‘dance’ progresses it’s pretty easy to tell who is who. Amy the seasoned pro has all the right moves; younger sister Rosana is slightly less at ease in her act, but has a mesmerising performance presence. Finally, the wigs and shoes come off, and both stand side-by-side, fully naked and proud of it. It’s a terrific opening.

What follows is an intriguing and well-realised autobiographical exploration of personal and sexual identity. A full arsenal of contemporary performance tactics is used: confessional monologue about choosing to become an escort, or discovering that you don’t really like sex with men; lists (of boyfriends and girlfriends slept with, of blow jobs given, of what can and can’t be chosen in life); physical performance action (simple, strong images of the two women standing, walking, lying naked); letter-readings of defences of lifestyle to a worried mother.

The central pole is used well throughout: both circle it slowly to the strains of that famous Irving Berlin song; at another point Rosana crawls in a circle around it with high-heeled shoes on both feet and her hands as Amy pole-dances in that oddly prim mock-balletic way so beloved of strippers. Projected on the rear wall of the stage are home video clips of the two as toddlers, cute as can be, hugging each other, blowing bubbles, dancing naked to camera without a care in the world – not much has changed there, then!

On the surface, they do indeed reveal everything ‘in an attempt to understand their own and each other’s sexual identities’ – although it is only during the ‘question time’ slot built into the show, which invites audience questions for just the length of one music track, that we get a hint of anything that probes a little deeper than the bare facts about sexual practices and preferences. The show claims to investigate how the ‘world they grew up in together has shaped them into who they are today’ but that seems to be the very thing missing from the piece. What we get are beautiful portraits (in many senses of that word) of Amy and Rosana Cade, but we learn little of what makes them tick on a deeper level, and little of what surrounds them in the wider world outside of their interweaved relationship, other than the most basic facts (there is a mother, there is a younger brother). Maybe it was the simple, stress-free and idyllic childhood gleaned from the video clips – but it feels as if the confessions we are party to are risqué in a kind of ‘naughty’ way, not really risky.

As for the ‘feminism’ claim: I’m very happy to hear young women using the ‘f’ word with pride, but it would have been great to have a little more evaluation of what that might mean for someone selling sex as a lifestyle choice. There is no dialogue, for example, with the notion that it is dead easy to get your kit off when you are a lithe twenty-something woman (much is made of Rosana’s shaved head and a little bit of blonde fluff under the arms, but Amy and Rosana are both very pretty young women by anyone’s definitions), and that this choice is tolerated by our ‘liberal’ culture. It would have been good to have had some acknowledgment that there is more to feminist discourse around the display of the female body (as pole-dancer; as performance artist – and ultimately, are these actually very different?) than whether you shave your legs or not.

What I do like, though, are the scenes of casual nudity – for example, when the two women, naked and under bright stage lights, take apart the pole with allen keys and pack it away whilst chatting about how it detaches and how it fits in the box. I’m reminded of The Two Wrongies and their usurping of the female body on display mode with their naked backstage banter. I enjoy the use of objects and clothing in the piece, the constant on-off play with the wigs and stockings and silk robes (reveal and conceal: now you see me, now you don’t), and the symbolism of the shoes, used in so many different ways. Although on that note, one audience member asks why we see Rosana in heels, but we don’t ever see Amy in Doc Martens…

Reflecting on that last point, I realise that Rosana’s stomp around the pole in DMs has quite a startling effect, not only because it is a strong and forceful visual and aural image, but also because it is just about the only moment that is about Rosana standing up and standing out as herself, not Rosana in response to big sister Amy and her world. I note that the show is called Sister, not Sisters. Although both are on display, and the show is credited to both women, this is ultimately Rosana the lesbian performance artist’s tribute to, and attempt to understand, Amy the pansexual stripper and sex-industry worker.

On a darkened stage, we see heaps of discarded junk – black plastic bags stuffed with goodness-knows-what, cracked white plastic chairs, a Brighton & Hove Council recycling box. A constant, amplified drip-drip-drip sounds. We hear muffled sounds of scraping and digging, and four boiler-suited figures enter, wearing miner’s headlamps. They speak in a kind of Riddley Walker-esque new-world old-world English, and as they pick through the rubbish, stories unfold. These four are future archaeologists known as SCUZ (Synthetics Collectors in Underground Zones), working through the pile of plastic bags, unearthing treasures used by humans in some long-lost era – things made of plastic, which the show implies, is no longer in use in this future, possibly post-apocalyptic age – and is therefore an interesting treasure.

Using some text, but mostly through physical movement, visual imagery, soundscape, and puppetry, a story unfolds – two of the four look on as the other two tell the tale of how humans used to live, in their odd world of Polly Pockets, plastic hair grips, and flip-flops (which are actually made of a natural material, rubber – but never mind). Things which are All Cast Away (cue song). It is a little unclear why two of the SCUZ members are seen acting out the tales and two are observing – and often hard to pinpoint where we are supposed to be. Are these two witnesses seeing back into the past? Are they imagining what the uses for these things might have been? (If, so it is hard to understand how they could guess so accurately.) ‘If plastic could talk, what story would it tell?’ is the byline for the show, and perhaps we are witnessing the plastic telling its own tale – but that doesn’t quite make sense of what we are seeing either. It’s a dramaturgical conundrum! This section of the show is overly long and suffering from numerous odd narrative choices. I struggle to work out what a TV-watching scene means, other than a vague ‘everything about our contemporary world and how we are raising our children is wrong’ kind of commentary.

However, there is some lovely performance work in this section, with acrobalance moves merging effortlessly into physical acting, and some great ‘poor theatre’ uses of random objects to tell stories, such as a bridal veil made from bubblewrap, and swing-bin lids as helmets on a bike ride. The use of children’s toys in the show – a xylophone, a little dog on wheels – is a nice touch, a gentle commentary on the Toys R Us throwaway culture handed on to our kids from age 0+. We see a rubbish cart arrive to cart the junk away, and again there’s a nice bit of classic physical theatre here – a chair, a bin lid and four black plastic sacks telling the story perfectly. The next section of the show tells us what happens at the landfill tip over the years, with the emergence of an odd little junk-baby as the new focus of the action…

If this all sounds familiar, yes – it is a very similar premise to Rubbish by lauded puppet-theatre company Theatre-Rites (reviewed for Total Theatre by Darren East). In Rubbish four steampunk-styled ‘excavators’ explore a mountain of black bin bags, from which puppets emerge and objects are animated. It is terrible timing for Feral, at the start of their life with this show, as Theatre-rites years of experience using puppetry to tell a similar story makes for a difficult comparison…

But all is not lost! The second half of Invisible Giant feels far stronger, more original, and more in keeping with Feral’s own style, established in their previous award-winning Brighton Fringe production Triptych. We move away from the cheery children’s entertainment mode of the first half into something far more dreamy and poetic. A great blanket of plastic bags unfolds across the stage, weaving and fluttering and transforming from wave to cloak to dress. A clear sheet of polythene creates sea ripples. A seagull soars and dives. Eventually – and we’ve waited a while but it’s worth it – the Invisible Giant appears, a glorious construction of clattering junk. A sad and sorry Frankenstein’s Monster which the human race has created collectively from our rubbish piles: and like Mary Shelley’s creation, this Monster murders without meaning to, and thus the poor seagull dies. An all-enveloping surf of white plastic rears up; a ‘skyline’ oasis of plastic bottles surrounded by fairy lights emerges. The only thing marring this lovely section of storytelling was the inadequate lighting – the key figure of the story, the Invisible Giant, emerging without any focused light. But this may well be down to the technical restrictions of working with the quick get-ins of a fringe production.

For me, the second half of the show is the show – the first-half potted history of the human race and its follies felt a little too polemical– the image of the sad plastic Giant and the doomed seagull tell their (literally) entangled story very well without any moral to the tale, and without the pre-amble. It was the sea of plastic in the sea, and the relationship between plastic (personified as the Giant) and nature (represented by the seagull) that was the essence of the tale. I also liked the fact that the plastic in the show was attractive, aesthetically pleasing – it was alluring, seductive, a dangerous drug.

There’s a lot of potential here, but the show needs a structural overhaul of the narrative, the voice, and the tone. And a good lighting design! The strong cross-over with Theatre-rites’ Rubbish does need to be addressed: there’s certainly room for more than one show for family audiences about our throw-away culture, but perhaps not for two puppet-theatre shows featuring a team of four excavators foraging through rubbish bags. Ditch the archaeologists! I sympathise with the frustration of finding that someone has come up with the same idea, but Rubbish is in its second touring year.

Invisible Giant is not there yet but it has a solid future, I am sure. Already present in these early days for the show (seen by Total Theatre on only its second public performance) are some lovely ideas, beautiful designs, haunting images, an interesting soundscape, and robust physical performances. The best is yet to come…