Euphorium
The Roundhouse, London

Shirley Dent

California-based Antenna Theatre's rendition of one of the most famous and misunderstood efforts by an English Romantic poet goes the whole drugs-'n'-tat hog. Let me describe for your delectation.

Standing in the Opium Lounge bar you are suddenly accosted by a wench, looking for all the world as though she's just been plucked fresh from nearby Stables market, haunt of young, voluptuous Goths off school at the weekend. Having been enticed to follow the faery's child down a dark corridor growing evermore dark (this was rather exciting and distracted me from the hypnotic swish-swish of my guide's velour skirt), she turned seductively and whispered something about dreams and visions. I have to confess to almost laughing out loud at this point.

An audio headset was then placed about my person and I was led into a room with an oversized wooden chair. There followed five minutes potted - 'pot' being the operative word - history of Coleridge and opium and Kubla Khan. And just in case I was a bit dim and hadn't got what all this was about, the word 'opium' was projected on the bare stone walls of the Roundhouse.

And then the cranky fairground antics really kicked off. The room grew dark, the chair rotated with me on it, another guide helped me off and placed what I thought was going to be a virtual reality headset on my shoulders (I must also confess to thinking at this point 'Wow. Never had a go at one of these before'.). However it turned out to be an adult sized kaleidoscope that made me feel like an extra from Equus. My hand was then placed on a corrugated rubber tube, which would guide me through the 'far out' dreamscape of Kubla Khan, as the audio rendition started to play, replete with exotic extras. So off I trotted round the walkways of Romantic ecstasy. Up popped all sorts of visual, audio and olfactory triggers to alter my state. Here a paper mache demon. There a 'stately pleasure dome'. Then a line from some thesp moaning about their euphoric state, with a bit of sitar playing thrown in. Then an array of floating bits and pieces - gift wrap from knicker boxes, cut out Abyssinian maids, the naffest red-eyed devil in the world that wouldn't even get a look in on Margate seafront. And while I'm on this subject, cut it out with the patchouli oil incense! No. No. No.

Don't get me wrong. This is all great fun. But it is no way to treat Romantic poetry and particularly not Coleridge who was probably the finest poet of them all when not prancing around on opium or being a sub-Swedenborgian sub-philosopher. Frost at Midnight is one of the finest short poems you will ever read. And Kubla Khan is a euphoric, strange phenomenon, weighed under by its own history and myth, a myth it has to be said of the poet's own making. But then should we take our cue from what is lesser about Coleridge, the less interesting things he had to say about his poetry?

Kubla Khan in making and reading is a scattered array of images. But it works by that disconnection, it is a building of and about the imagination. And it is this that makes it a great, strangely disturbing experience. Not drugs or opium or 'far-out-ness' or anything else. Coleridge was enthralled by the poetic imagination and went to great efforts to describe it. Allow me to quote from the Bibliographia Literaria:

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole of soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put into action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive though gentle and unnoticed, controul (laxis effertur habenis) reveals itself in the balance and reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

I have allowed myself this act of over-indulgence for this reason: in his sustained engagement with that abstract cave of ice built in air - the imagination - doesn't Coleridge just startle you, take your breath away, infuriate you? Why couldn't Euphorium, if it was really serious about Coleridge, quote even just one line from the above passage, something that is ecstatic in its very language, without the need for cheap tricks? I hope no one would answer because it is too difficult. It is difficult but it is worth it. The point of this is borne out when, in the last room of the exhibition, you are seated and a full-uninterrupted version of the poem is played. A beautifully spoken version, it must be said. I closed my eyes and I was enveloped in Kubla Khan's strange beauty, in the force of its language, in the oddly intractable idea of the imagination that fills its every sigh.

From which we can conclude this: if you want a truly euphoric experience, just read the bloody thing. You may also want to give Frost at Midnight a try.

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