It's All GREEK To Me    

MONOMANIACAL LONDON

Steven Berkoffs Cockney version of the Oedipus myth has returned to the West End (it was seen at the Arts Theatre in 1980). This depiction of "a bunk-up wiv mum" transported to lowering Tottenham skies has ranged from award-winning acclaim in Los Angeles to a recent operatic set- ting in Germany (to be seen at Edinburgh).

Berkoff the writer poses certain problems. His style ranges from conventional and by now unremarkable mock-Shakespearian pentameters to a would-be lyrical obscenity, pour epater les bourgeois, one feels, via some authentic, tough amorous-erotic poetry, as in the rhapsodic affir- mations of love from Eddy (Oedi- pus) and the waitress he marries. Here the writing is strong, soar- ing and sinewy.

Some set pieces gather memorably scabrous momentum; the rats that teem past London land- marks and the swollen figures of drunken Scots football-fans evoke both a nightmare landscape and Berkoffs ambivalent love-hate relationship with jingoistic yob culture. Elsewhere social comment can serve merely to halt the impetus - adoptive Mum's lament for abused children seems to belong to another piece, as does her husband's litany of the used and discarded, punctuated with the bark of "so what?" And familiar Berkoff targets (including the upper classes and the rich - by no means the same thing) are dragged in with more enthu- siasm than consistency: would a reactionary of a certain age trea- sure pictures of both Hitler and the Royals?

About Berkoff the director .'there are no doubts. This superbly drilled production at the Wyndham's imposes its own dark world by sheer bulldozer conviction. The four players rarely wander from the central kitchen table on the raked floor of Geoff Rose's set, backed by a frieze of fanged, Bosch-like faces by Gerald Scarfe. The acting carries us through ruminative obscenity and (even dodgiert the opening comedy of family squalor, here not so different from the Glumms with physiology on the brain and oddly old-fashioned. The author plays Eddy's adopted dad; Georgia Brown, that nasal whine almost parodying East End kosher, makes a welcome return, not least when clapping on a fright wig and snarling into the Sphinx's feminist diatribe.

Gillian Eaton and Bruce Payne are the mismatched couple. Mr Payne is obviously a discovery, a few years out of RADA and with recent film work to his credit. His Eddy is vital, intelligent and physically disciplined in the best Berkoff style. The performance is tremendous, whatever your reser- vations about the work - and don't read the author's pro- gramme note: it drags in every- thing from acid rain despoiling Norwegian forests to the Heysel Stadium, and suggests a happy family life as the solution to vio- lence. But Dr Goebbels had t.per- fect family life, Mr B.

Martin Hoyle

THE CHARACTERS, foul- mouthed and grotesque, of Steven Berkoff's 1980 Greek, now revived at the Wyndham's Theatre, might also be freneti- cally animated caricatures. But in this case the artist is not Cruikshank but George Grosz.

THE CHARACTERS, foul- mouthed and grotesque, of Steven Berkoff's 1980 Greek, now revived at the Wyndham's Theatre, might also be frenetically animated caricatures. But in this case the artist is not Cruikshank but George Grosz.

This is a powerful work of hatred and disgust, but one that may well offend the squeamish w fastidious. For me the con- stant references, in more demotic words, to excrement, copulation and the male and female sexual organs rapidly began to pall-but not, clearly, for a predominantly youthful audience on the second night.

What did not pall was a quar- tet of quite remarkable performances under the bril- liant direction of Berkoff himself. Berkoff gives the best of these as Eddy's coarse, mud- dled and intolerant old foster Dad. Bruce Payne, a young actor so far known chiefly from his film roles, brings to Eddy the murderous incisiveness of a cut-throat razor. Georgia Brown is both Eddy's cosy foster Mum, and a Sphinx who embodies the female principle to thrilling effect; while Gillian Eaton's modern Jocasta has an extraor- dinary moment when she gives vent to a prolonged Munch-like scream on learning of her incest.

There is a similar degree of theatrical attack in Steven Berkoffs new production of his 1979 play, Greek, at Wyndham's. Freud used the Oedipus complex to label manifestations of infantile sexuality. Applied to Berkoff, this explains a lot about his obsessive interest in blood, guts and faeces, and, for that matter, why he should want to try to give the Oedipus myth a happy ending.

Translated to contemporary London, Eddy (Bruce Payne) does indeed murder his father (Berkoff), marry his mother (Gillian Eaton) and solve the riddle of the Sphinx (Georgia Brown). But the plague, which supplies the opportunity for Berkoffs most virulent and excoriating descriptions of contemporary life, is put down to the British disease, "the illness of inertia", rather than to Oedipus's crime. And instead of putting his eyes out in horror, our Eddy returns to the loving arms of his mum.

Verbally, this is the filthiest show in town. Eddy slangs his father to death with the vi- olence of his language. The text is delivered in the stylised doggerel that is as much a fea- ture of Berkoffs work as the puppet-like, white-faced mime of the cast. What stands out is Berkoffs decadent lyri- cism. Appeals to love and tenderness float on a sea of bile.

Full of sound and fury

STEVEN BERKOFF, whose Greek is being revived at Wyndham's Theatre, has been around for the last 20 years or so, functioning as director, adapter, actor and playwright. He has written several plays, but 1 do not think that he will be remem- bered primarily as a playwright. A talented and highly amusing mimic, he is able to inject a sem- blance of life into his own flimsy creations which, I suspect, would collapse if not propped up by his presence.

In a programme note, Berkoff claims that "Greek" is "a play .about incestuous love". But . "Greek" is not about incestuous love, despite the fact that it con- tains a character named Eddy (surname not provided: probably Puss) who loves his mum, nor is it even a play, unless one defines the term widely enough to , include anything that takes place in a theatre.

He makes half-hearted and spasmodic attempts to superim- pose a retelling of the Oedipus myth on to his portrait of a cock- ney family of four, Mum, Dad, Eddy and Doreen, but what he succeeds in presenting is merely an imitation of television's Alf Garnett and family, laced with what the theatre management, in a foyer warning to intending pat- rons, describes as "explicit" language. If the piece is about anything, it is about Berkoff's simulated disgust, and he would appear to be disgusted with just about everyone and everything - drunken Scottish football hooli- gans, Irish terrorists and work- ing-class families are high on his list. His crudities are similar to, and no more illuminating than, those of Anon on the nearest public lavatory wall.

Steven Berkoff (who also directs, as well as playing the Alf Garnett character in rather mut- ed vein) communicates pruri- ence rather than disgust, giving one the strong feeling that his sound and fury signify precisely nothing. Bruce Payne brings a cheerful zest to the role of Eddy, and is at his best in his scene with the Sphinx (Georgia Brown in her second role) whom he addresses familiarly as "You old slag". When it was first staged in 1979, "Greek" may have shocked one or two people; though, one wonders, to what purpose? But I am surprised that anyone thought it worth reviving BOW.

Charles Osborne

Master sketcher and meal-maker: Steven Berkoff with Georgia Brown

Fable Plagued By Food

Eight years after its fringe premi- ere, Steven BerkofTs cockney Oedipus returns in style, with a West End revival and as the libretto of Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera at the Munich Biennale (reviewed last Saturday by Hilary Finch). According to your cultural loyalties, you could describe this piece as an exercise in mythic tran- sgression (as recommended by Grotowski), or as the act of a graf- fiti-spraying vandal. Either way, Berkoff would probably agree.

If he has put the skids under Sophocles with on-stage violence and an unstoppable avalanche of four-letter words, he draws the line at the real Sophoclean atro ity. After all he has gone through, Eddy decides that incest is by no means the worst thing in the world; so, instead of putting his eyes out, he heads back home to carry on as a flourishing cafe proprietor with a rapturous sex-life. This strikes me as an entirely sensible decision, and a promising subject for comedy, which in part Berkoffs production supplies. Sad to say, the piece also has a message. for Britain.

We are in the grip of a plague; as evidenced by child abuse, abor- tion, and the poor quality of res- taurant food. Berkoff shows an ob- sessive interest in food; it is appro- priate that his runaway hero strikes it rich by taking over a fly- blown cafe and banishing greasy chips and cardboard pies in favour of sausages containing real meat. It is here, though, that the myth gets into a twist. First Berkoff identifies the cafe as Eddy's kingdom; then we discover that, not withstanding the greatly im- proved sausages, the plague is continuing unabated in the surrounding streets.

As a fable, Greek nose-dives into incoherence; and its text, irrepressibly fertile in cockney Shakespearean catalogues of dis- gust and horror, turns to mush whenever it attempts the ex- pression of love. Berkoffs production, as ever, is as scrupulously disciplined as a karate display; with beautifully organized pantomimes of bleary commuters and pub rowdies. Georgia Brown makes a lovely meal of the text.

But Berkoff remains the only pantomime artist on stage. What- ever he presents, from a panting rat to a snorting coffee dispenser, is as the sketch of a master draughtsman. Energetically as Bruce Payne and Gillian Eaton accompany him, they remain actors and nothing more.

I.W.

Yobbo of Thebes

THERE'S NOTHING complex about Steven Berkoffs Oedipus. Eddy, the hero of Greek, his modern version of the myth, is just a Jack the Lad from Tufnell Park. Evicted from home after a fair- ground fortune-teller has predicted that he will do his dad in and have "a bunk- up with his mum", he wanders into a caff whose NF owner he verbals to death by bringing on a heart attack through grisly descriptions of the GBH he intends to inflict on him. Marriage to the man's waitress wife follows and Eddy becomes king of a fast food chain. Then, one fateful day, the couple he thought his parents reveal that they fished him from the Thames after a Southend pleasure steamer hit a mine. Eddy's wife, who lost her infant son in the self-same accident, screams: "I just pissed in my pants." And, after this contemporary catharsis, Eddy finds a modem way of resolving the catastro- phe.

Greek archetypes and Cockney ste- reotypes are juxtaposed throughout the play. The pair who reared Eddy are presented as gorblimey caricatures. Cat- erwauling "Underneath the Arches" or "We'll Meet Again", they belchingly totter down the pub, gawp at the telly or burp out their admiration for the Royal Family. But the wallowings in nostalgia and patriotism to which they are prone keep getting rudely cut short by reminders of the racist opinions, varicose veins, her- nia belts and grubby underwear with which they are encumbered. Bringing things down to earthiness is Berkoffs speciality. High-flown sentiments, sometimes couched in lines of pseudo- Shakespearean verse, are constantly cut down to size by slashing outbursts of four-letter words. , With frequent jokes about farting and limp husbands, there is sometimes a whiff of the seaside postcard about this play. But, most often, its aggressive jeer- ing is reminiscent of some particularly putrid alternative comedian. The style Berkoff revels in is a kind of yob ora- tory. What he finds disgusting is de- nounced in disgusting terms. Barely minutes into the play, you've had vomit, turds, rancid bacon, black- heads, BO and dirty knickers thrown at you. By the end of the evening, dung hills of scatological imagery have been heaped up and cascades of vomit dis- gorged.

Given this, it's not surprising that the aspect of the myth that most engages Berkoffs imagination is the plague rav- aging Thebes. In his unusual pro- gramme note to the play, he explains that he sees parallels to this in acid rain, deforestation, holes in the ozone layer, atomic waste in the Irish Sea, polluted water supplies and football fans "reeking havok" in our "violent ridden society". To this worrying catalogue, the play adds Aids, abortion, food preservatives, rats, the dustbinmen's strike, massage parlours and masturbation (always a Berkoff fixation). What causes these things, it's imaginatively suggested, is "violence" and "inertia". Some light is finally cast on the yoking of these two factors when the play gets round to stating its message; vigorous lovemaking is a great preventive against all ills; if people spent more time in bed, there would be a lot less trouble. True to this romantic notion, when Berkoffs Oedipus discovers he's been having in- cestuous sex, he doesn't put out his eyes, but sticks out his tongue. "Bollocks to all that!" he yells, elbow- ing qualms aside. Haring back to carry on with mother, he reasons that what he's doing is less harmful than inserting sticks of dynamite into torture victims', anuses. Subjecting cosy banalities to knock- about derision throughout the play, Berkoff ends by erecting one of his own: all you need is love. Powerhouse perfor- mances from Bruce Payne as Eddy and Gillian Eaton as his wife throw plenty of electricity into Greek's speeches of erotic celebration. But, like Georgia Brown - wasted in the crude role of the Cockney foster mum (Berkoff himself plays her hus- band) - even they can't charge the play's platitudes with any real energy. Greek aims to shock but, basically, it of- fers sentimentality in bower boots.

Greek continues at Wyndham's Theatre for a limited season

Peter Kemp

All Photos Taken by Nobby Clark