At last a terrific show in this year’s mime festival - Du Goudron et des plumes (Tar and Feathers), in which you gasp at the brilliance with which the French acrobatic troupe, Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, invent a wondrously unstable world on a swinging raft that's deliciously mad and imaginative. It’s as if echoes of a children’s game on swings had suddenly mushroomed into a sphere of its own sound and motion laws, and in the dark, bare Barbican Theatre is a perfect place to watch it. Hurry - you have just two nights left.

At last a terrific show in this year’s mime festival - Du Goudron et des plumes (Tar and Feathers), in which you gasp at the brilliance with which the French acrobatic troupe, Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, invent a wondrously unstable world on a swinging raft that's deliciously mad and imaginative. It’s as if echoes of a children’s game on swings had suddenly mushroomed into a sphere of its own sound and motion laws, and in the dark, bare Barbican Theatre is a perfect place to watch it. Hurry - you have just two nights left.

It's a strange thing that boxing, that most dramatic of sports, hasn't been the subject of more plays. It has a protagonist and antagonist, the ring is a ready-made stage, and the sport has thrown up more than its fair share of larger-than-life characters. So, as with buses, when you're waiting for one to come along, two arrive in quick succession; Roy Williams's Sucker Punch, which was at the Royal Court earlier this year, and now the equally brilliant Beautiful Burnout. Comparisons are invidious, so I won't make any, other than to remark that they are two very different beasts.

Archaos were the mad, bad and dangerous troupe who revolutionised circus back in the Eighties and early Nineties – their antics with juggling chainsaws, raunchy Galllic attitude and mayhem with motorbikes is celebrated with a pop-up exhibition at the Bargehouse in the Oxo Tower Wharf on the South Bank for just three days ending on Sunday. It’s also a tribute to the genial genius behind the troupe, Pierre Bidon, who died earlier this year, at the age of 56.

Charm is as invisible as the circus but as undeniably present in Le Cirque Invisible, an adorable little presentation for which parents should go miles with children to see this month. Charlie Chaplin’s fourth daughter and her husband are not young things any more, and their two-person show is at least 40 years old in its various guises - but they simply keep adding and subtracting gags, costumes, dressing-up box illusions, magic tricks, rabbits, soap-bubbles, locking down a hall of children and parents for two and a half hours in raptures.

He may describe himself as “a Geordie chancer”, but in reality Jason Cook is a warm comic whose material is utterly devoid of cynicism. Yet he’s far from being pious - he spices up his act with caustic barbs for deserving targets (quite often himself) and has a raft of sharp putdowns for hecklers who think they’re wittier than he is.

As we look on the strictly dieting future that undoubtedly waits for the more esoteric arts after Thursday’s election, it’s evident that the dance landscape has already been blighted - and self-blighted, at that. Somewhere in the past few years a loss of confidence in dancing itself has allowed expressive and aesthetic exploration to become increasingly replaced by undemanding scenic gimmicks and numb circus derivations, subtle matters by dim clichés. My depressed thoughts after watching two of the middle scale shows that used to be common all over Britain and now are scarce as hens’ teeth.

Clowns are supposed to be chubby, grinning, funny, with anarchic hair and big red noses, like Coco. Or they are Chaplin-types, oppressed little city folk mutely combating the vast machines of the working life. They are not generally shaven-headed skinny men and women with beaky noses, starved cheekbones, and a way of life so severely monastic that it would drive you or me stark staring mad.