When the tiger jumps there is a collective gasp. He is enormous, and as he springs, a ripple of muscles propels him through space in a movement of primeval, powerful beauty. For a split second everyone is mesmerised by the memory of some ancient past - and then the show goes on. Kids bounce happily up and down in their seats, munch popcorn, yell, giggle and burst into spontaneous applause - and that's just the grown-up kids. Everyone under seven is in circus heaven as a parade of clowns, aerial artists, dogs, ponies, magicians and a delegation of Moroccan bellydancers, dressed in a few spangles and an awful lot of snakes, jiggles, juggles and dances before their delighted eyes.
There are hoots as a bedraggled clown executes a nifty tango with a lady in evening dress, and an "aaaah" for the antics of the Shetland pony, and a chorus of "ooohs" as a trapeze artist hits the roof of the big top with a resounding "thwack". Duffy's Circus is in town, as familiar and as strange a sight as it has been since the company first went on the road in Ireland in 1775.
Of course a great deal has changed, especially in the last 20 of those 200-odd years, as David Duffy, ringmaster of the present show and a seventh-generation Duffy, points out. "The circus has changed dramatically," he says. "Not so much the performance, because it's important to us that the show stays traditional, but the surroundings. We have a new big top instead of a leaky canvas tent, comfortable individual seats instead of hard damp boards. And the technical side has improved greatly - the sound equipment, lighting, that sort of thing. A lot of the people who believe circus is a thing of the past haven't been to the circus in 20 years. They should give it a try. They might be pleasantly surprised." One of the most fundamental changes, however, is one you won't see in the ring, whether you go to a matinee or an evening performance. Circus in Ireland used to be a summer-time affair - for one night, and one night only, as the Duffy speaker-van used famously to declare as it wound a meandering path from town to town - but the season now begins in mid-January and runs until the end of October. With some 35 performers and 40 animals to support, it's just not economically feasible to shut up shop for half the year any more.
"Even if we just barely cover our costs in January and February, it's better than being closed," says David Duffy. "But having said that, they can actually be some of the better months. After the new year is over, people seem to want to get out again - whereas in July and August we can run into a lot of opposition because there are a lot of other things going on. "Our biggest competitor in the summer is the weather. Good weather is bad for us. Our coastal tour is a lottery, to be honest. If we get bad weather, then we're sure to do good business; but if we get very hot weather, everyone goes to the beach instead.
"Over 10 months of the year, to break even we'd have to be taking £10,000 to £12,000 a week to cover artists' expenses, public liability insurance, road expenses, ground fees and advertising," he adds. "But obviously we do it, and in the last couple of years we've expanded enormously - so it's a myth that circus is a dying art. Speaking for ourselves, we've never done better." Duffy's is one of four tenting circuses on the road in Ireland every year, a remarkable number for such a small country, all the more so when you compare the unfunded, unsubsidised, unglamorous status of circus in this country to its peers in continental Europe, particularly in eastern Europe.
And the generally upbeat mood is nothing short of astonishing when you consider that, following the much-publicised incident last spring in which undercover animal rights activists secretly filmed the animal trainer Mary Chipperfield beating a chimpanzee at her training centre in Hampshire, the animal rights lobby has been more vociferous in its opposition to performing animals.
"We respect people's opinions and we recognise that there is a moral issue as to whether animals should be performing or not," says David Duffy. "But the majority of the animals here are second and third generation circus animals, just as the human performers are; they've been born and reared here, so this is their natural environment. As far as cruelty is concerned, we're happy that people who are mistreating animals are being found out.
"We're not for one minute saying there aren't problems in the circus industry. But there's nothing hidden away here. All our animals are on view all the time and there are regular, unannounced spot checks by animal welfare bodies. I have to say that in all my time in circus in Ireland I've never seen any cruelty. And since 1775, there has never been any allegation of cruelty made against Duffy's Circus."
If snakes could talk, they'd probably agree. Many of the huge snakes snoozing blissfully in their totally tropical tank - next door to the alligators, snoozing happily in their specially-built indoor swimming pool complete with waterfall - were sold to Duffy's Circus by members of the public who, incredible as it may seem, bought them as pets. Only to discover that not only do cute little constrictors grow into great big heavy snakes, but that snakes of all shapes and sizes, when annoyed, have a tendency to bite.
"Oh, it doesn't hurt," declares Marilyn Chipperfield airily. "It bleeds a lot and there are hundreds of tiny little holes, but there's not a lot of pain because their teeth are so fine. We have a boa called She who bites fairly regularly because boas are tree snakes, and when they're up off the ground they tend to strike at things. And I think the sequins shining on my armband tend to catch her eye. There'd be more pain with getting an injection from the doctor - but I must admit that when you see a snake flying at you with its mouth open, your heart stops for a second." Marilyn joined a circus in her native Australia at the age of 16 and, after working as a trapeze artist and with horses, met and married Tommy Chipperfield when she was 27. They moved back to England, and then to Ireland, and stayed. "At Duffy's Circus, the animals come first and we come second - or third, maybe," she muses. "Working with animals is very rewarding because they're honest. If they don't like somebody, there's usually a very good reason for it - and when they like you, they like you unconditionally." As we speak we are standing inches from the hooves of half a dozen grey stallions, munching calmly in their stalls. So calmly, in fact, that visiting vets have been known to wonder aloud whether these are stallions at all. "They're stallions all right," says Marilyn, "Look at that one - he's a gelding, and he's a real plodder by comparison. He just clumps around the ring, doing what he has to do, but the stallions hold themselves proudly, and prance. When we have enough space, we stake them out, which is better, but on this ground they have to be in their stalls. But they're quite happy, as long as they're in the right order, see?" She names the horses from left to right. "Put them the wrong way round, and there's murder." In the tiger enclosure, a single pair of eyes blinks out from a sleepy, stripey face. "They're fed at night after the show, so they sleep all day. They could come out and run around in their enclosure if they wanted to, but they won't. You won't see those guys until show time." How does she feel about the tigers? In the ring, she squats beside one and puts her hand on its back as part of the show. "I think they're the most beautiful animals in the world. And they command a lot of respect. I feel that if the tigers weren't happy, they wouldn't do what we want them to do, because let's face it - who's gonna make them?"
Not Marilyn, and not her husband Tommy - who, having spent a lifetime training circus animals, was horrified by the Mary Chipperfield incident. "I said, `look, this is going to affect us, the name and everything' but Tommy refused to change his name," says Marilyn Chipperfield. "He said `everybody will know it's still us, and they'll ask, `what are they trying to hide?' And we don't have anything to hide, because we haven't done anything wrong."
Canadian by birth and an anthropologist by training, Jennifer Johnston has - with her husband Bill - been working on publicity with Duffy's Circus for the past nine years. "They're real circus people," she says, "and that makes a difference to the way they do things. Very, very few families can say they've been in business for 200 years and still run the show. That in itself is a rarity. And another thing about Duffy's Circus which is very, very important is that all of the adults in this tent on any given evening will have come to the circus as children - there's a very strong cultural tradition there which is synonymous with the whole cultural landscape of Ireland."
Circus in general, she says, has a unique and frequently undervalued role in the performing arts spectrum. "People who don't like what we do see it as negative because it's popular culture - yet if you look at `performance' across the world, it goes from opera and ballet to circus and carnival. Circus is one of the basic ways in which people can experience the world of the performing arts, because everybody can experience it without being educated in it - and it's a wide variety of experiences involving all the senses.
"As a genre, it's not like theatre where actors drive to work, put on costumes and make-up and assume roles. Circus people live on the job. Their everyday lives are very close to their performing lives. Five minutes before the show they might still be in their street clothes; and then they get dressed in their trailer and stroll to work." Jennifer, too, is a circus person made, not born - she and Bill "joined up" following a tourist visit to the house of John and Mabel Ringling in southern Florida, and have never been able to leave. "We arrive in town and put up a tent - and that circular tent has a kind of psychic energy. It appears and disappears. And it frees people from inhibitions; that's why you get this romantic notion of running away to join the circus. People see it as a free and happy existence. "Of course, there's a different side as well. It's hard work, long hours, seven days a week. Not many people would actually stick it out - the rain, the mud, the trucks breaking down so you don't get where you're going. But I worked in a bank once and I thought that was awful."
One corner of this Co Dublin field is the domain of the Kost family, whose various members supply four acts from this year's programme at Duffy's. Kost pere is Austrian, hence his name - Otto - but speaks and acts Italian both in the ring and out, an old-style clown with a razor-sharp sense of timing. David and Willer Kost are brothers, but while David's looks are classic Austrian - long blond ponytail, fair skin, blue eyes - and as polished as his award-winning act on the Washington trapeze, Willer is what might be described as italianissimo.
No sooner have we got the Italo-Austrian borders sorted out than he produces a Turkish child - born in Izmir during a tour with an Italian circus - and launches an extra-linguistic explanation (involving considerable amounts of finger-snapping and shoulder-shrugging) of why it is that, in the ring, he is known as the fearless Spanish roller-balancing wizard "Garcia Clemente". One thing is absolutely clear: he enjoys Irish audiences as much as they enjoy him. "My two acts is beautiful with audience because I act with temperament - if people are sleeping a little bit, I want that they participate with me, you know? I find the Irish audience very good. And after the show they come and say to me `How you are doing this? You are crazy'."
The crazy bit is not the ever-higher balancing act which Willer has been performing since the age of nine, but a blindfolded number on the Wheel of Death which has to be seen to be believed and which puts him totally at the mercy of his wife Suzy, who controls the speed of the spinning metal tube. "If she's not doing well, I fall down," is Willer's succinct summing-up of an act which gives new resonance to the phrase "without a safety net".
But where, for the Kosts, is "home"? "OK," explains Willer, "we have a property for my daddy, when he maybe stopping in the ring for work. But I think he will never stop with this life. Because if you come with this in blood, is very difficult to live stopping, no?" And even after just a couple of days of circus in the blood, I know exactly what he means.
Duffy's Circus will be giving performances twice daily at The Goat in Stillorgan, Co Dublin for two weeks from July 26th; it then goes on tour around Ireland
