The Donkey Show at Proud Camden, NW1

reviewed for The Times, 22nd June 2016

Image Credit: Jane Hobson

Being a young critic, I was probably thought likely to know what to do at a glittering disco club night “loosely inspired” by the themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Except, of course, that I chose to pass most evenings in my twenties in darkened rooms with Chekhov. Add the lack of club gear in my wardrobe and a last-minute calorie craving, and that’s how I came to spend a night stiffly hovering amid body-popping fairies, clutching a weak Pimm’s in totemic defence as smoother revellers raised their bejewelled eyebrows at my chocolate-stained jumper.

If only this 1970s-style event knew what it was trying to do. Arriving at Proud, a club in Camden’s Stables Market, we weave our way to the performance in the main space past crowds of ordinary partygoers who are just there for the outdoor terraces. Once we find our way to Club Oberon, we bop on the floor while a series of Shakespearean characters belt out Seventies classics. So Lady Puck, a rollerskating transvestite, leads us in a chorus of Candi Staton’s Young Hearts Run Free, before disco-boy Sander falls for Helen with I’m a Believer.

So far, so jukebox, but there’s nothing else here. Worse, The Donkey Show (created by Randy Weiner and Diane Paulus in 1999) fails as a point of access to Shakespeare. With no sustained dialogue, newcomers haven’t a clue why, between numbers, Puck is pointing a phallic pink syringe at everyone’s rear cheeks. If it magically changes the direction of our singers’ lusts, we’re none the wiser. You’ll leave knowing Oberon only as a mumbling girl in purple flares, hiding behind her cheap stage beard and shades.

Fluid sexualities, ecstatic abandon — such, of course, is true to Shakespeare’s Dream. But if anything, this night is tame by comparison. The climactic Donkey Show is a brief, sexless gyration between Tytania (Melissa Bayern, who deserves better) and two Village People impersonators, with large afros, cloth donkey ears and questionable racial politics. For a sex show, it’s a right flop.