THE KAOS DREAM. To 20 October.

Tour

THE KAOS DREAM
by William Shakespeare.

Kaos Theatre Tour to 20 October 2007.
Runs 1hr 35min No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 September at arts depot North Finchley.

Sordid anti-romantic critique.
How’s this for political correctness? Director Xavier Leret’s reworked Dream starts with a blow-job on a bar-counter, and ends with a ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ set in adjoining toilets, involving, with the aid of a prosthetic male organ, every sexual position conceivable to the fantasies of man and woman.

Between, there’s a sex scene for three lovers that’s a three-in-a-bed romp, without the bed. The ass-head Bottom’s given has nothing to do with donkeys. He also obtains a dangling donger that’s treated to the kind of multi-handed attention which would cost a fortune in a cut-price brothel.

The rival women are characters I wouldn’t want to argue with (one’s worked with an outfit called Pants on Fire, the other with a stage and screen combat group). Not your typical Shakespeare, then. But all I could think about was how to describe Mat Fraser.

Fraser plays Puck. And he (the actor) has two severely fore-shortened arms. It’s a physical fact used when he apparently uses them to climb onto the counter. Later, as he looms at an angle, or horizontally in the air over the lovers Puck’s misleading, there’s a rare magicality to the scene.

Hermia and Helena’s wrestling-match is livelier than the screeching dialogue of some productions. But there’s little of Kaos’s signature physicality otherwise. And the cut-down story’s hard to follow, lovers apart. Anyone not knowing the play would find it tough working out what the supernatural strand, let alone the Mechanicals’ plot, is about.

Leret writes of discovering the Dream’s a “very dark warped play”, as if that hadn’t been common currency at least since Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary appeared some 40 years ago. It’s been investigated often enough, most recently in Gregory Doran’s recovery of what Midsummer meant to Elizabethans.

But few productions have been as one-track as this, the play as interpreted by adolescents looking for every mucky pun on the back seat of the school-party’s homeward-bound bus. It might well speak to testosterone but hardly to much else in humanity and reduces the play to a one-stop shop with only a single brand of goods.

Helena/Quince: Erica Roberts.
Egeus/Fairy: Jules Bushell.
Puck: Mat Fraser.
Titania/Lysander: Nicholas Chambers.
Demetrius/Bottom: Ralf Higgins.
Oberon/Theseus: Serge Soric.
Hermia/Snug: Tina Barnes.

Director: Xavier Leret.
Designer: Sarah Blenkinsop.
Lighting: Hansjorg Schmidt.
Music Director: Jules Bushell.
Costume: Lieutske Visser.

2007-10-01 16:12:53