An act of brotherly love

If you caught the small but perfectly formed Caesar Twins performing acts of unfeasible acrobatics at the last Royal Variety Performance, you'll have marvelled at their bemuscled balances and daring backflips. But edge-of-the-seat physical thrills come at a price - and one of the Caesar Twins almost paid the ultimate one.

It's the kind of accident that makes you wince. While spinning on the ghoulishly named Wheel Of Death, a kind of human hamster wheel, at a German circus, Pablo Caesar took a terrible tumble off the top. Crashing eight metres to the ground he was knocked into a coma and woke up to find himself in a wheelchair. He wasn't supposed to walk again.

But, thanks to the brotherly devotion of twin Pierre, Pablo fought his way back. Six months after the accident, he was back doing one-armed handstands. 'He needed help with everything, like going to the toilet. It was a tough time for us,' recalls Pierre. 'Even when he said he didn't want to work at it, I pushed him on.'

So they're tough cookies, these Caesar Twins, whose only outward difference is that their identical tattoos are on different arms: Pierre right, Pablo left. Born 25 years ago as Pawel and Piotr Czizmowski in the deprived Polish backwater of Bydgoszcz, where some box their way out of poverty, these former schoolboy acrobatics champs have bounced, coupling their undoubted gymnastic abilities with a sexy charisma that adds an erotic gloss to their circus tricks.

The benefit of hindsight has led them to believe that, in a curious twist, the accident was the making of them. Shafted by their German circus employers, who were all for sending them back to Poland, the Czizmowskis, with the help of director Markus Pabst, decided to strike out on their own as the Caesar Twins.

Built around their striking blond looks and the uncanny bond that unites identical twins, their show, Caesar Twins And Friends, is designed to demonstrate that they are more than just bouncing boy babe acrobats. That novelty would wear off pretty quickly. With choreography and music adding to the 80min mix, the show pushes their stamina to the limit and their engaging personalities to the forefront.

Unlike the masked mysteries of Cirque Du Soleil, the Caesar Twins aim to keep it real, even though they're aware their bond can be tough for outsiders.

'It's quite difficult for people to come into our world; they can feel shut outside,' says Pierre. 'But it's not difficult for us to have a relationship,' adds Pablo. 'But at the moment we don't have a girlfriend.' He means girlfriends, but I get the point. Given that their website features artfully shot naked images and that they flash their fair share of flesh on stage, they are not short on homoerotic appeal.

They make no bones about playing to that image and an intense physical intimacy that could, in other contexts, feel unsettling. An earlier show was called One In Two and their act is built around a level of trust - you need it if someone is balanced upside down on your shoulders - that operates on an instinctive level. Can they help it if they look like a Pierre et Gilles wet dream?

'We're comfortable with our look, it's the way we are,' says Pierre. 'We are twins and it's normal for us to walk on the street and hold hands. We have no problem with that.'