Sore Bottom / Funny Bottom

Or a tale of two bottoms.

Saturday, and a theatrical double bill.

Doo Cot’s Fold Your Own at the Arts Depot, Finchley, followed by A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Roundhouse. The former cost £8 and the latter £37.50. But which would have the more energy, freshness and vitality? Which would tell us more about our culture and Eastern culture and the interrelationship between the two? Which would be more spectacular? Which more satisfying? Which more fun?

Well you will have guessed that Doo Cot (http://www.doo-cot.com/) won hands down.

On entering the studio we were dressed in kimonos (replete with obi sash) and hotel slippers and ushered through what I took to be a simulacrum of a Shinto Torii gate (yeah all right it was a door) and ushered onto the stage, and in particular onto a round floor cushion. The central conceit of the piece was that we were actors in a Japanese film, although this was really an excuse for a series of set pieces of theatre / film / puppetry / play. We made origami spirit birds. We sang “My Way” in Japanese. We did aerobics. We laughed. A lot. Around us swirled swordplay, anime, puppets, robotics, yakuza, green tea, Godzilla, flower arranging, evil robots, a faceless man, a water feature. At the end we were shown bits of the film, culminating rather worryingly in a repeated loop of us doing the aerobics. On screen I looked like a very nervous Stephen Berkoff in my black kimono but no-one seemed to mind. To get a flavour have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI1UKmh7-hA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Edoo%2Dcot%2Ecom%2Fprojectb%2Fexercise%2Ehtml.

My only complaint was that I starting to get a very sore bottom from sitting on the cushion for so long.

If Doo Cot was Tiswas, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Swap Shop, except that the snotty woman at the booking office wasn’t very keen at all in taking my spare ticket after The Devil Wears Prada fell ill in the morning of the show. “No returns” she said, waving me away with a hand gesture that would make even my post tai chi calm blood boil. My mood wasn’t improved when I saw that I was rewarded for being one of the first to buy tickets, and in the most expensive section, with a seat at the side rather than in front of the stage. Did it matter? Whether it did or didn’t, it did, because I spent quite a lot of time thinking about whether it did, if you know what I mean!

Listen, it wasn’t by a long chalk a bad production. It’s just that after the fun of Doo Cot, and the spectacular and brilliant Platonov, it suffered by comparison. The play was performed in something like 8 languages, so you would have a burst of Hindi then “the course of true love never did run smooth” then a burst of Sanskrit. Shakespeare has many great attributes, but the greatest of them is the beauty of the language, and this was lost. The English parts felt like a compressed text so that those of the audience who, unlike me, hadn’t bothered to read the play before they came, could keep up, but like those dreadful ITV Jane Austen adaptations which convert her work into bodice-ripping romances, you are missing the best bits. And when they did speak English, a lot of it was incomprehensible, a combination of the actor’s accents and the poor acoustics (I could see mikes right in front of me but lord knows where the speakers were).

Except for Bottom. Without doubt one of the finest Bottoms I have ever seen. A big Bottom I grant you, a loud Bottom certainly, but an expressive Bottom, and most importantly, a funny Bottom.

And visually it was stunning. The colour co-ordinated clothes were great. The big set piece stunts were fab – fairies bursting through a paperclad bamboo frame or spinning up and down on ropes and swathes of fabric, Puck spinning a rubbery web around the arguing lovers in the forest, a martial arts style fight between the sets of fairies.

But I couldn’t help feeling that it felt a little bit too much like it was grafted on. It felt too obvious an attempt to fuse Shakespeare with Crouching Tiger and Cirque de Soleil, and just a little bit worthy in its lets all speak our own language so no-one can fully understand the text kind of way.

Good but not great.

And as I lay in bed thinking about the dusty red sand of the enchanted fairy forest, my mind went back to the controlled mayhem of Fold Your Own, and it was Godzilla not Puck who sang me to sleep.

Yours truly,

Robin Goodfellow