The Donkey Show
at Club Pleasance (Venue 23), Edinburgh

Gerry Feehily

Kitsch is somewhat impermeable to criticism.

In choosing what is tacky, second-rate and garish, it invites indulgence, a climate of knowingness between audience and cast. It would then seem churlish to evaluate The Donkey Show on purely aesthetic terms, since a classical aesthetic has been trashed from the start. Based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, an examination of the faithlessness of lovers, The Donkey Show is faithful to the original only in plot and the Elizabethan taste for gender transformation. Oberon, the king of the fairies, has become a nightclub owner. Titania, his queen, a disco diva with fetching stars on her otherwise naked breasts - all this steeped less in a theatrical tradition than in the more recent phenomenon of blaxploitation movies and 1970s disco.

So the forest of Athens is now a club, and the audience is ushered into a realm of strobe lights and tinsel, oiled and muscled male dancers - Oberon's erstwhile sprites - and a moustachioed dj spinning out a catalgue of disco's greatest hits to which the cast sing along. It is on these terms, on kitsch, that The Donkey Show sets out its wares, and would be successful on such terms were it not for the climate of compulsory gaiety which, from the queue onwards, is foisted upon the spectator. Where Shakespeare's comedies invite the suspension of disbelief, The Donkey Show invites the suspension of individuality. As soon as the spectator steps into the spangle and heaf of Oberon's realm, he is coralled, jostled, pushed here and there as the platforms on which the dancers flounce are towed and spun.

To complement the fake hilarity of a night with Club Med, the troupe director, with grim determination, urges us all to be cheerful. As with Club Med evenings, and perhaps Chinese re-education camps, one leaves with the facial muscles lop-sided and sore. But the nature of kitsch, in the end, is perhaps a cynical one. In exposing human emotions, and the past, as ultimately trite, it cannot stimulate in the audience anything more than a leer of recognition. One exits The Donkey Show with glitter and tinsel in the hair, the after-buzz of loud music in the ears, and the sense that a hothouse atmosphere, where the audience is obliged to take part in a spectacle, if only to move aside, is ultimately a cold and forbidding one.