Kazuko Hohki, Oh Doh

Review in Issue 19-4 | Winter 2007

It is about endings: eight rain-soaked ‘tourists’ standing in the stagelights full of tea and biscuits, wondering how a guided walk turned out so weird. This is the Oh Doh (King’s Road in Japanese) package deal: interactive, innovative theatre-maker Kazuko Hohki leads a tour about the lives and endings of famous King’s Road characters, along King’s Road itself. It is true street theatre. Hohki’s eccentric Japanese tourist persona is naïve but beguiling; it is difficult to resist her innocent enthusiasm as she takes the group to the changing rooms of Bluebird, a punk reunion outside Starbucks, a shortcut to Utopia with Sir Thomas More in a church hall and into a suitably magnificent ending involving a car chase, a cup of tea in a block of flats and a round of applause on the Chelsea Theatre stage. True stories and real people are made bizarre and amusing by Hohki’s highly original casting: a smirking female Aleister Crowley in feathers snorting lines of cocoa powder in a specialist chocolate shop is but one of her quirky touches. Between each section of the tour, actors linger among the public, subverting the otherwise sedate street scene with outlandish costume and semi-threatening behaviour. Audiences are expected to keep up, join in and be willing to leap into waiting cars, get turned away from members’ clubs, unnerve passers-by and stick with their intrepid, ever-smiling Japanese guide. As demonstrated in this unique outdoor experience, the end is definitely worth it.

Presenting Artists
Presenting Festival
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Jun 2007

This article in the magazine

Issue 19-4
p. 34