Enfant Terribles's Marvellous Imaginary Menagerie	Roll up, roll up! The circus is in town and it’s here for your delectation and delight. The flamboyant Dr Longitude – fittingly styled for the occasion – has roamed the globe in search of odd beasts to fill his travelling menagerie, and even odder keepers to keep them. He brings them here to you today for your viewing pleasure. Decapuses (ten-tentacled octopodoi cousins), giant wasps and three legged beasts abound, and with each comes a thrilling tale of how they came to be caught and tamed. From their pop-up stage, resplendent with plush curtains and port holes and parasols, they spin us yarns replete with songs, dance and puppetry.

To say they put on a compelling show is no overstatement. I was en-route to review something else when their high-spirited spectacle caught my eye. I dallied for a second. After five minutes, I begrudgingly checked my watch. Already late, I sat down to watch – just for a moment. An hour later, I still hadn’t moved. (The show I was en route to see was showing the next day as well, so I am not quite a terrible person). In an environment like Latitude, it’s very common to drop in on things and drift in and out – there’s just so much to see, and half the fun is in wandering in on something you hadn’t planned on seeing. But it can be rare when the thing you stumbled across keeps you rooted to the spot for its duration, especially when it’s not in a tent but the open field; even more especially when you’re hotfooting it across said field in pursuit of another show which you are supposed to be reviewing (it was on the next day it’s fine – I’m only a marginally abominable person). So all in all, hats off chaps: Enfant Terribles are, quite literally, impossible to pass over.

Whether it’s their high vaudeville style, nostalgic for a lost age of commedia dell’arte camp and circus trickery; their flair for outlandish props and puppetry, conjuring all manner of madcap adventuress; or just the irreverent brilliant silliness of it all – something about the troupe makes it impossible to drag yourself away. Personally I think what did it for me was the Mick Jagger-inspired raindance, though this might serve more as a reflection on me than as a critical assessment of a piece of theatre.

Enfant Terribles clearly excels at this madcap style of colour-blasted bells-and-whistles high-energy storytelling. It’s done with pace and panache and a flamboyant absurdity that will delight both the grown-ups and the littl’uns, and reviewers to their peril. The only note of dissonance comes when I later read the programme entry, which promises a “magical, magnificent and malicious experience”. Magical, yes. Magnificent, undoubtedly. But there seemed little evidence for malice or meanness. The programme entry does seem to hint towards a darker undertone than I picked up on: but then I am someone who does not keep appointments and gets distracted in fields, so my critical faculties are perhaps not to be trusted.

It did feel as if the story did not quite reach a rounded conclusion, and that the relationship between characters –the glue between the episodic, Aesop-style narratives – was not quite developed as much as it could have been to bring the component parts together as a whole. However, these seem like minor quibbles to bring against a show that was, from start to finish, a delight for the ears and eyes, and a wondrously imaginative excursion that brought back a sense of the spectacular to the stage. Whatever (and wherever) they’ve got up their sleeve next, Enfant Terribles is surely one to keep an eye on.