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.