The Eternal Return, the third instalment in the Dissolution trilogy, posits a now-struggling Sabu in 1952 as he supports his family by performing in Tom Arnold’s Christmas Circus in Haringey Arena. With the inclusion of British Pathé footage of circuses in 1950s and 60s Britain and their bizarre parading of tame beasts as ‘exotic entertainment’, the film shows the indignity Sabu felt by being similarly deployed. The film thus explores the notion of success in the absence of agency as it imagines the resentment of an individual for whom the price of prosperity was to be typecast. In Sabu’s case, this was the conflation of his background and his career that imposed a seemingly inescapable relationship with elephants; the animals recur throughout his filmography. It also highlights how, in spite of his extraordinary fame, Sabu was cast as sidekick and rarely the lead or love interest.
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