Preview: James Thierree, Peacock Theatre, London

"I believe the new circus era has ended its cycle now," says the Parisian James Thiérrée, who made his circus debut as a child with his parents Jean Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin (daughter of Charlie) in their Cirque Imaginaire.

He might have run away from that circus, but his own work takes the skills he learnt there into new realms. For his Peacock Theatre show, La Veillée des Abysses, his cast of five includes a contortionist, an acrobat and an opera singer who journey through a series of disjointed dream-like scenes, from a tumultuous storm to a fairy-tale knight and dragon to a sofa that swallows its guests.

His is a world of endless invention, by turns eerie, beautiful and very funny. Thiérrée is always seeking the wide-eyed wow factor and toying with the emotions and excitement of the audience, but he prefers not to do it with flashy tricks.

"I'm less interested in impressing the audience and more into getting closer to them, which makes the magic almost more powerful," he says. "If you don't put that distance between them and you, you show things that are almost possible to them."

Thiérrée takes everyday props - a chair, or a flight of stairs - and opens up something beyond our everyday experience of them. He has a childlike imagination but isn't afraid to follow it into its darker depths to make something less saccharine, more surreal.

Yet some things can't be shaken off. A exceptional physical comic - there might be something in his lineage there - Thiérrée has the clown's need to make people laugh. "Laughter is very important to me," he says. "I need to feel that people will go with a smile." Simple entertainment is, he says, "a noble thing".

The point about Thiérrée - and the essence of circus, for that matter - is the thrill of live performance. "It's flesh right there," Thiérrée says. "It's not movies with the distance of the screen and the special effects. Magic happens right here."

To 15 October (0870 737 7737)