Jim Rose: Shock and Bore

Sitting alone outside a shabby chip shop, Jim Rose gazes morosely at an invisible spot in the middle distance. The wiry figure in red snake-skin boots and blood-spattered clothing attracts curious glances from passers-by. But with a nonchalance that only three decades in show business can bring, Rose continues to smoke his cigarette, ignoring the tiring Festival traffic around him.

“Hey, beautiful! I knew you’d turn round if I said that.” Clearly the most proficient of ladies’ men, the showman acquires the attention of the whole room as soon as he enters the diner. A coke and French fries are on their way.

Throughout the nineties, Jim Rose Circus was the top ticket at the Fringe. With each passing year, the show would become more daring, more grotesque: Paul “Slug” Lawrence would ingest worms and grasshoppers for an astonished crowd and chase them down with a sword; Bebe the Circus Queen would balance a watermelon on her back while a friend split it with an axe; The Amazing Mr. Lifto would hang incredible weights from piercings in his genitals. And then the Circus was gone, not to return to the Fringe for the best part of a decade.

With a sense of excitement, Rose recalls the show of 1999 and why he hasn’t been back since: “After I had shown women sumo wrestling and Mexican transvestite wrestling I didn’t want to come back. I always liked to start off by pounding pop culture over the head in Edinburgh. I didn’t want to come back with a show that couldn’t top the shows I always did.”

With the ease of a practised ringmaster, his scripted patter follows in a neat segue: “But the show we’ve got now is probably the most risqué show that has ever been brought to the Fringe; it’s the most risqué show that’s ever been done, probably in the history of theatre.” The qualification "probably" sticks in the mind but Rose continues with the hard sell, “We’ve got a girl that’s a really prestigious artist who blows blue paint out of her ass onto a canvas. She’s an abstract expressionist. She’s got a very confident rectum; it’s got a firm handshake. Each one of her rear-enderings can be a mixed media: you know, shit happens. Due to the unpredictable nature of her projections, each piece of art is a one of a kind. She’s our Andy Warho, she’s our Vincent van Ho, she’s our Pablo Picasshole.”

Casting calls in New York and Florida have assembled a new and unusual troupe for the Circus of 2008. The one-trick ponies of old are gone to be replaced by an eighties rock tribute band with a propensity for self-mutilation and a host of gaunt, nude ladies. But surely it is difficult to persuade someone to strip off every night and spray paint out of their nether regions? “It is difficult. But when I do casting calls, all like-minded monsters sit up in their crypts and come to an audition.”

Rose is clearly very fond of the acts that grace his ring and this seems to help draw in the starlets: “I explain to them ahead of time that I will be protective of them and I need them to trust me. But I sort of have a reputation, which makes it easier to persuade people to do things.”

The things Rose has in mind are certainly unusual. With the help of his wife, Bebe “Circus Queen” Aschard, the daughter of a French circus owner, he has taught one girl how to pull clothes out of her vagina and shown another how to fake suicide as well as helping the circus’s resident artiste discover her painting apparatus. The band’s lead guitarist is also involved after Rose taught him how to mentally prepare to put his penis in a racoon trap. “That was tough,” he admits.

There is no doubt that Rose is a consummate Hollywood professional. Name dropping whenever possible, the likes of Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) and David Bowie are all called upon to adorn his extravagant past. Years on the road, touring from country to country and, more recently, filming a reality TV show for the Travel Channel appear to have worn Rose out. But this is certainly not how the performer sees it – Rose rejoins, “There’s no place I’d rather be than in the throes of danger. Sure, doing the TV show is tiring because they put me in situations that I’d never really be in. I’d never be at the Grand Canyon at six in the morning but yet there they are, waking my ass up, saying, ‘Act like you love this fucking big ditch.’ So it’s tough but there’s no place I’d rather be than on tour.”

Is this enthusiasm very convincing? Rose's eager and animated front gives way to a an element of lethargy when discussing the future. The bright eyes become dull and a hint of fear creeps in: perhaps what once was can never be re-enacted. A long pause follows, and a sigh. “You know, people don’t realise that I have been married for over 20 years. As sappy as it sounds, my favourite thing in the world to do is to take long walks holding my wife’s hand and talking.” Silence again.

A quick look at Rose’s family photo-blog will tell you just how much he values his relationship with Bebe. But Jim Rose the man is difficult to pin down for long without Jim Rose the character returning to dominate: “That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our periods,”—the word periods is drawn out like a piece of chewing gum—“where we bring five or six girls home a night and it’s all assholes and elbows in bed.”

And again, the line between man and character fades into the ether. Stories of high stakes pinball games with Vedder and binges with Bowie until 7am are difficult to ascribe to one aspect or the other: reality or an expanded version of the truth. Asked if he thinks that his stage persona can in fact be removed from his everyday thoughts, Rose remains philosophical: “I mean, who am I really? I don’t know. Do you know who you really are?” It is difficult to answer.

Although Rose insists that he has no regrets about days gone by nor nostalgia for them, it is now that Jim Rose of Circus fame is least persuasive. The hard sell is stepped up: “If I didn’t have the show I have now I would probably be nostalgic but I’ve got the best show I’ve ever done right now so it’s all about the future.”

Unfortunately, as is often the case, the opinion of the critics is not in line with that of the artist and a run of two and three star reviews and a condemnatory epistle from no less than The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner have led to low audience numbers for the Big Purple Cow’s late show in 2008.

So what has changed since the days when Jim Rose was one of the Fringe’s few guaranteed money-spinners? In the internet age, it takes a lot to shock an audience. Jackass, Dirty Sanchez and films from the comic Shaun of the Dead to the disturbing American Psycho have eroded the gap between on-screen and live horror, perhaps irreparably.

The antics of the Circus are certainly more sexually explicit than they were ten years ago, possibly to compensate for this, “but I don’t know if it’s my most extreme show,” Rose comments. “I mean, it is literally more extreme than the shows I was doing in ’93, ’94. But in ’93, ’94, everything I was doing was so new that it felt extreme.” More extreme than anything can feel today, perhaps.

Forever seeking the upper hand, Rose is certain that he is a victim of his own success. Unprompted, he adds: “You know, when Jackass started copying that stuff [we did in the early nineties], we let them run with it. And they’re friends of mine. I’ve known them since they were baby mules and I even helped them learn some stunts.”

Despite going on to sincerely contend that more than one show at this year’s Fringe has copied his ’96 act in its entirety, Rose again maintains that he bears no grudges. But with a flow to his speech that has been absent until now and a tension rippling under his passive exterior, the feeling pervades that the changing times have occupied the man’s thoughts for much longer than the last few minutes.

All this means that Rose is certainly insecure about his Circus’s current incarnation. At every opportunity he stops to invite criticism of the various tricks and stunts while resolutely defending the integrity of a performance that can often be more flash than bang.

Ever the professional, he looks to enhance the characters of his performers and cover up elements of the show that sport audience plants. Animatedly he says, “Those girls in the show, they come from an amazingly high art background and to get them to be all sleazied up like that and to do this type of show is a departure but they are such great actresses that by the time the show’s over, you know for a fact that if you run into her in an alley, she’s gonna give you a blowjob. And they do give an audience member a blowjob backstage. We throw out condoms and whoever gets the blue one gets a half hour with them.”

It is difficult to imagine the Jim Rose of the nineties being so keen to sex up his show like this. Back then, talents and skills—freakish as they were—allowed his acts to stand proudly without need of a defence. But the world seems to have moved on since then and left this Circus behind. In 2008, all that a new show has achieved has been to highlight that history can never be repeated – a rather sombre note for the Fringe.