Quentin Blake’s CLOWN is a picture book with no words in it. Told that a circus company wanted to adapt it, he said he was appropriately speechless. The result goes up in a tent on Walthamstow Town Square from 3 December.
It is the first time the book has been staged at all, and circus turns out to be the obvious answer to a story told entirely in pictures: a discarded toy clown thrown into a bin, going out to look for a new home. The company are keeping the story as Blake wrote it, with a small amount of language added to carry the youngest audiences through.
Luke Hallgarten, who founded The Revel Puck Circus, says he loved the book as a child and that getting the green light from Blake was a pinch-me moment. His line about it is the good one: if ever there were an art form you could call hand-drawn, it would be circus.
Two shows, two very different evenings
CLOWN runs at 11am and 1pm, Thursday to Sunday. Fifty-five minutes, no interval, aerial work, acrobatics, costume puppets and Pierrot clowning, with the circus doing nearly all the storytelling. It is the family show and it is pitched young.
Fête du Puck is the evening one, back after a sold-out 2025 run with an entirely new cast. A hundred minutes with an interval, at 4.30pm and 7pm on Thursdays and Fridays and 2.30pm and 5pm at weekends. It goes up in their new mini big top, a smaller structure built so they can put a proper circus into dense city sites rather than needing a field.
The thing that makes this company different
Ten per cent of the tickets for every single performance are held back at £3, on a no-questions-asked basis, for local people who would otherwise not be coming. Some of those go out through community organisations across the borough. That is not a gesture, it is roughly one seat in ten, all season.
Every performance is semi-relaxed as standard, which means you can move, take a break and come back in with front-of-house help. Level access throughout, wheelchair spaces and a free carer seat at every show, and no loud bangs in any performance at all. There is haze. There are also dedicated SEND performances where the cast introduce themselves, the house lights stay up and nobody minds noise.
Why Walthamstow
This is their fourth winter in Walthamstow and the eighth time they have played Waltham Forest, counting summer stands in Leyton Jubilee Park. Last winter brought 12,000 people through the tent and sold out over Christmas, and they have now had more than 45,000 people in since December 2023, nearly three-quarters of them from local postcodes.
Hallgarten lives in Leyton. He describes Waltham Forest as home rather than a venue, and the numbers rather back him up. The company also trains local young people for front-of-house and hospitality work through the borough’s Future Formed programme.
The timing is neat, too. Blake’s own centre, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, opened in Clerkenwell in June, so this is a good winter to be interested in him.
The London x London Take: Book CLOWN for the children and Fête du Puck for yourself, and if you are choosing one, choose the evening show, because a new cast in a brand-new tent is where a company this good will be taking risks. Go in the first fortnight: last year sold out over Christmas and this year has a world premiere attached to a knight of the realm, so December will go. And if money is the thing stopping you, the £3 tickets are real, there are some at every single performance, and nobody will ask you anything.
Need to know
- What: The Revel Puck Circus Winter Festival, with CLOWN and Fête du Puck
- Where: The Little Top, Walthamstow Town Square Gardens, London E17 7JH
- When: 3 December 2026 to 3 January 2027
- CLOWN: 11am and 1pm, Thursday to Sunday. 55 minutes, no interval
- Fête du Puck: 4.30pm and 7pm Thursday and Friday, 2.30pm and 5pm Saturday and Sunday. 100 minutes with an interval
- Price: Adults from £19, concessions from £17, children from £14. Previews on 3 and 4 December are discounted, and ten per cent of every performance is held at £3
- Access: All performances semi-relaxed, level access, wheelchair spaces and free carer seats, no loud bangs, haze used. Dedicated SEND performances
- Booking: tixr.com
- Nearest station: Walthamstow Central
More in the area in our guide to Walthamstow restaurants, and the rest of the season in London at Christmas.
