They’re back: Cirque du Soleil, the leading proponents of modern mega-circus, characterised by high gloss, high concept and high volume as much as by high wires. The latest offering from the Canadian company created by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon is even more bombastic than the usual brand of souped-up stunts and synthetic theatricality.

Scheduled for a short UK arena tour, it utilises mammoth video screens and a selection of songs drawn from previous Cirque shows. Against a backdrop of constantly mutating imagery, 36 performers scuttle about like exotic insects, tumbling, contorting, dancing or dangling from harnesses. The soft-rock score, which intermittently references African rhythms, tango, bossa nova and, on one particularly ill-advised occasion, techno, is wrapped around lyrics laden with clichés about learning to fly, reaching for the sky and mountains to climb. “Somewhere between reality and imagination, we search for something that was never lost,” intones a sententious voiceover.

It is, in other words, cobblers served up with shallow presentational sophistication. Some of the imagery is pleasant enough. As a helpless, dreaming figure, suspended from a balloon, drifts through the virtual world of his somnolent consciousness, he floats through star-studded heavens, over a landscape that turns into the curves of a reclining woman’s body, among exotic plants and butterflies, and into marine depths filled with hundreds of arms undulating like fronds of seaweed.

But there are a great many irritants too. Screens flooded with close-up shots of wide-eyed children reaching out to wise and wizened old ’uns, along with the ghastly globetrotting plastic pop music, imply some vague and mawkish notion of togetherness. A punky, stilt-walking clown dressed in scarlet stalks about gabbling in gravelly gibberish. And even the most impressive of the actual circus acts is lost in the relentless onslaught of noisy vocalising and frenetic onscreen activity.

There’s no genuine human feeling here, nothing that is memorable – the show is merely a succession of anodyne scenes, devoid, not just of dramatic interest, but even of the sweat and danger of old-fashioned sawdust-and-sequins-style circus. It all seems utterly pointless; the scale of the production never equates to intensity of experience, so that the viewer is left with nothing more than a massive sense of so-what. Spectacularly soulless.

Tour details: www.cirquedusoleil.com

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