The KAOS Dream (A Midsummer Night's Dream) - Arts Depot - Finchley

Heading up the road to the Arts Depot see this “adaptation” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by KAOS Theatre, renamed The Kaos Dream, set in an “urban underworld of strip-clubs, pimps and pole-dancing”, I reckoned that it was either going to be very good or very bad. Or as the heroine of Angela Carter’s Shakespeare-infused masterpiece “Wise Children” puts it, “hope for the best, expect the worst.”



Well, not only did I thoroughly enjoy this production, but I thought it was touched with genius.

The “adaption” took the form of heavily editing the text rather than re-writing it, and although in principle I am not a great fan of cutting down the great man’s work, at the same time I was relieved not to have to face three hours of Bottom’s tedious rehearsals for the grand finale etc etc.

If you are going to set a play, especially Shakespeare, in a time or place other than its natural one, then there has to be some reason, it has to illuminate some aspect of the work, not merely be a gimmick to get the punters though the door or to try and make a play more “relevant”. And perhaps against expectation, this really worked. There is a dark side to many of Shakespeare’s comedies – bad things often happen. If not exactly killing, the gods certainly put the characters through the mill for their sport. They are comedies in the sense that the resolutions at the end are happy, rather than tragic. The seedy East End strip pub setting brought out a sinister edge to the play (but without falling into the clichéd tropes of Eastenders and Brit Gangsta flicks) at the same time as fitting in nicely with the bawdy aspects of the play. It was in parts gloriously and shambolically filthy. Another touch of genius was to make the fairy queen, yes, a dragged-up fairy queen. And it did that rarest of things with a Shakespeare comedy, it made it funny.

Of course there were flaws, some of the acting a bit too camp, the stage set a bit wobbly in places, the grotesque rectum of the arse (rather than ass) placed on Bottom’s head, but I think that what this showed is that if you do something with real gusto, if the decisions made as to how the stage a play are backed up by its contents, if you entertain an audience, they will forgive the rough edges.

I couldn’t help feeling that what I was watching was in many ways a more authentic experience of Shakespeare than the prim and proper stagings of the RSC or at the Globe. Contrast for example the ultimately disappointing Indian version of a Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier this year at the Roundhouse (http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/03/sore-bottom-funny-bottom.html) where the production values seemed to be grafted on rather than shed light onto the play.

Looking again at that earlier review, I see that the production was also trounced by something at the Arts Depot. Which only makes me more angry about the disgraceful state of play at the AD. The audience for The KAOS Dream was woefully thin (and I’m not talking about waist size). I am on their mailing and emailing list but got no flyers about the play. In fact, I haven’t had any literature from them for ages. And if it’s a 90 minute production, why start at 7.30, a difficult time for anyone working in town or who needs to sort out babysitters, when they could easily have started at 8? And the play having finished at 9, we wanted to stay and have a drink there, but the bar was shutting 15 minutes after the end of the show. And as we discovered, this part of Finchley is hardy overflowing with sophisticated wineries of the type where the members of the Latte Days’ salon can sit in the comfort they/we require at their/my age and discuss important issues of the day without the fear of being knifed by some feral dope-smoking adidas wearing ASBOnik. Shame on you, Arts Depot.