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‘Everything you see has been built by us,” Toti Gifford informs me with a sweep of his arms. I’m being shown around Fennells Farm in Gloucestershire, home to the much-loved Giffords Circus since 2014, with the company deep in rehearsals for its latest production, Waterfield. There’s an awful lot to see. The landscape is green and lush and scattered with livestock, with the site still functioning as a farm and brewery. The company headquarters sits inside a huge repurposed cattle shed and the farm is peppered with makeshift barns, all built by hand and rammed with props, paints and all manner of circus mementoes and mysteries (including, quite brilliantly, a human cannonball).
There’s a new winter venue and a restaurant and hotel under construction, with both scheduled to open over the next few years – the dreaded planning permission pending. The area surrounding the famous circus tent, topped with twinkling lights, has also been spruced up. Sick of wading through mud whenever it rained, Toti Gifford – who also runs a successful landscaping business – decided to dig up the field and replace it entirely with pebbles.
Photos of Gifford’s late ex-wife and co-founder are everywhere, running up the staircases and plastered across the walls. A circus performer and horsewoman through and through, Nell Gifford died of cancer in 2019. All these years later and she’s still the first name on everyone’s lips, mentioned almost as soon as I leave Stroud station and the opening topic of conversation during my chat with Toti. We sit down to talk in a very pretty and very tiny circus wagon, which will serve as home to the whole Gifford family – Toti, his second wife Alice and their blended family of four children – during the long touring season.
Wearing a wax jacket and sturdy boots, Toti Gifford looks like the farmer he still is but is also prone to occasional bursts of poetry (“When the sun sets, the horizon turns into liquid gold”). He quit school at 15, built his landscaping business at 17 and, after meeting Nell, suddenly found himself in a very different world: “Circus was never really a dream of mine. I’m a farmer’s son and a digger driver. I didn’t think it was going to last. Nell was the driving force. She was destined for all of this. I just enjoyed making the wagons and having fun.”
Toti and Nell Gifford met in their early 20s. Nell was already obsessed with horses and the circus. Soon after the two met, Nell landed a job in a circus in Germany working as a horse groom and rider. Toti followed Nell to Germany and, watching her thrive at her work, quickly realised there could only be one future for the two of them: “I suddenly understood that I wasn’t going to get the circus out of her. So I’d have to build her one instead.”
When Nell was invited to talk about her first book, Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl, at the Hay literary festival in 2000, Toti said: “Let’s take our circus.” Only, at this stage, there was no circus: “We made it from nothing. We got a whole load of friends and travellers who were fruit-picking down the road to help out.” They pulled wood out of skips, converted a shepherd’s hut into a box office, went to Spain and found a horse and bought a tiny circus tent for £330 from “a lady called Edith in Somerset” in the Trade-it classified ads paper.
Giffords Circus was born: a family-run operation that, 26 years later, still maintains a distinctive warmth and charm with its handmade costumes and hand-painted wagons. This year, there’s a brand new wagon to add to the collection. It’s a pub on wheels, which has been turned into an exact replica of a friend’s nearby inn, complete with a painted bucolic backdrop pinned behind the bar. (At Giffords, even the toilets – with beaded curtains sweeping across the doors – feel like a piece of theatre.)
So what makes Giffords special? Toti pauses and eventually answers: “Charm. Raw and honest entertainment. A breath of fresh air.” Building up a bit of steam, he adds: “It’s about companionship and family. We’ve got seven or eight different nationalities and they’re all managing to get along in the field, in the rain, in the mud, and making people laugh. I mean, why can’t the world do a bit more of that?”
Director Cal McCrystal, who has been working with Giffords for 14 years, believes there’s one more special ingredient: “We’re very good at bringing a theatricality to the circus, which doesn’t work against the form. People feel like they’re watching a bit of a story, but we’re effectively just creating an environment in which we’re able to present the acts in their best possible light.”
McCrystal is probably best known for his work on the National Theatre’s hit comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, and is careful to weave laughter into the fabric of show: “There’s always a really funny through line that carries our story. So while Giffords presents as a very traditional circus, the comedy narrative gives it a cutting edge.” This year’s show is called Waterfield and the theme is “something very Cotswoldy”, says McCrystal: “Wind in the Willows was a big inspiration. We decided to base the show on animal characters and see where that leads us.”
After the interviews are over, and the company has come together to feast on pie and mash, a small audience gather to watch the dress rehearsal. Gifford Circus’s famous tent is filled with green grass, tall spiky reeds and mist-like dry ice. It feels a lot more whimsical than last year’s 25-year anniversary extravaganza, Laguna Bay, and – at least for the opening few numbers – a fair bit more gentle and poetic. When Alice Gifford presents her horse and shetland pony in the ring, the act feels closer to a quiet family moment – a surprisingly sweet stroll in the woods – rather than a full-on circus performance.
However, as the acts unfold with spellbinding precision (and the occasional thrilling stumble), they gradually ratchet up in intensity. After reading a review that claimed Giffords wasn’t really known for its dangerous acts, McCrystal decided to up the ante: “This year we’ve got the most dangerous acts we’ve ever done. I actually have a physical urge to run out of the tent when a couple of them are on. The Ethiopian Addis Ababa Troupe is crazy [the gymnasts throw each other around like beach balls] and then there’s the Wheel of Death. My God. It’s a panic attack to watch.”
He isn’t exaggerating. At the end of a high-octane show (I’m still catching my breath after the knife-throwing), a huge double wheel, held aloft on an axle, is brought into the tent. It’s like a giant hamster’s wheel, only the Valencia Flyers are the ones doing the running. With the wheels in motion, the two performers sprint inside the wheels, always – it feels – on the verge of falling. Next, they jump on top of the wheels and, finally, they do it all wearing blindfolds. The little girl in front of me is dancing in her seat, caught somewhere between joy and terror. It’s all a bit mad and magical. Dangerous yet strangely comforting, too. In other words – classic Giffords Circus.
Waterfield is at Sudeley Castle, nr Cheltenham, to 5 May; Blenheim Palace, nr Oxford, 8 to 18 May; touring to 27 September.
