A new play written by Lou May Miller, a modern take on Pedo Calderon’s ‘Life Is A Dream’ ,finds an early grave in this debut performance by Kudos. “All of life is a dream and dreams are nothing but dreams. Sigs wakes from a dream to find he is lord of all he surveys. Sigs wakes from a dream imprisoned in a cave”. But as he wakes from strings of nightmares, the audience are left in this wake, catching mundane wisps of love stories, men in white coats, changing identities and further plot complexities which serve no other purpose than to aid confusion.
This performance should never have been allowed past the school gates. As it turns out, Kingston university is to blame for letting this performance loose on the public, robbing unsuspecting Fringe-goers of their time and money.
Its one saving grace is that it is actually less than the hour slot it is billed under, so although I can empathise with such lines from the script as "there's no time to lose" and the response "I've lost it already" it is less painful to relate to upon checking the time leaving the auditorium.
Somebody needs to tell them that absurdism is not a synonym of terrible. It certainly takes influence from surrealism as what is dream and what is life completely merge in this piece. It is difficult to distinguish between the two, but this is the concept at hand, albeit fogged by weak direction that does not test this enough. The design concept is also under-worked; on the one hand there are flashes of colour, on the other clinical white costumes. Had the acting not been completely awful, I think the show would still have failed to grab me as the clunky verse was awkward to follow and was stylistically dull, unoriginal and mind-numbingly boring.
Who knows what happens in this play? I doubt the cast really do and I can only hope the director had a better idea, although from watching it, this is also doubtful.
