Obludarium

Despite the tent’s moderate size, it somehow seems to house an extraordinary number of bizarre and deformed creatures. Bearded ladies and swollen-headed hydrocephalics are animated by a chilling ringmaster in a weird and wonderful world of technical virtuosity where knives zoom and clunk, fire spits and tightrope walkers curve through the air, all to the bohemian boom of Romany music.

The Forman brothers (twin sons of filmmaker Milos Forman) have created a colourful freak show where puppets become full-sized beings, their movements recreating the travelling circuses of the 1930s. The Obludarium (Czech for ‘the monster aquarium’) and its troop of oddities is part cabaret, part circus and part theatre, and viewers will feel their reality altered once its has cast its spell.