First staged in 2009, and now touring the world to mark its 15th anniversary, OVO is Cirque du Soleil at its absolute finest. It has all the hallmarks of the brand: dazzling costumes (Liz Vandal), magnificent sets (Gringo Cardia) and jaw-dropping feats. But the conceit — the performers are all insects, reacting to the discovery of a mysterious egg — is a perfect foil to the inherent grandiosity of the world’s greatest circus.

Set to a live Brazilian soundtrack (composer Berna Ceppas) drawing from bossa nova, samba, electro and funk, the performance is animated by a sense of pace and excitement which carries the audience from curtains up to last dance. And by ‘curtains up’, I do of course mean ‘instantaneous deflation of a nine-metre-high egg, which disappears from the stage in the first second and is never seen again’. This is Cirque du Soleil, after all. We must expect the unexpected.

All the big set pieces are here: huge dance numbers, tumblers leaping from the rafters and launching themselves from great heights onto hidden trampolines. But it is the quieter moments which truly transfix. In one particularly arresting number, an aerial silks performer stretches and spins within a floor-length cocoon, distending and morphing around her limbs. In another, a white spider contorts atop a pole with inhuman poise, her entire weight supported on the roof of her mouth.

The show absolutely sings when it inhabits the physicality of the insect world, rather than simply using it to tie together a series of spectacles. At their best, the performers swarm, twitch and preen, transforming the uncanny grace of the acrobats into the truly alien movement of invertibrates. OVO is circus at its grandest scale, played out in the world of the miniscule. The contrast is glorious.

Evie Prichard

Playing at the Royal Albert Hall Friday 9 January – Sunday 1 March 2026.