The notorious art heist was intended as a protest against “niggardly arts funding” – still a relevant theme – and there’s an edge of rebellion to this fantastical spoof, though the collision of frenetic slapstick and clownish hilarity dominates.

Circonoclasm creates a fictitious art gallery from which Georges Seurat’s neo-impressionist painting The Circus has been stolen. At its finest, it’s a cartoonish satire of the art world, deploying novel feats, and the comic reinvention of bread-and-butter ones, to show how narrative circus can be transfigured into fully realised theatrical performance.

Highlights include acrobats assembling for crisp tableaux of famous artworks – from a hoop-wielding duo imitating Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man to an ensemble posing for Picasso’s Guernica – as well as a terrific sequence where incompetent detectives rewind CCTV footage looking for clues, and the company performs the entire show to that point in rapid reverse.

Melbourne’s emerging circus artists were heavily impacted by lockdown, yet these ones remain undaunted. On the strength of Circonoclasm, their future looks bright.