GREEK
Transient Theatre
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Steven Berkoff strikes me as a third-tier British playwright. Not quite a hack, but not Gray either. True, in Greek and Lunch Berkoff displays a talent for capturing the poetic rhythms of speech and for whipping off evocative and arresting monologues. Yet there’s an emptiness behind all the virtuoso wordplay–fancy language and stage tricks substitute for something genuinely original.
Berkoff presents us with a grim, nightmarish London wracked by a horrific plague, a world where violence is commonplace and marauding thugs terrorize a population numbed by impotence and television. Eddy is the son of a couple of working-class Londoners who send him out on his own after hearing a prophecy that one day he will murder his pa and sleep with his mum. The wandering Eddy finds himself in a luncheonette, where he bitches out the waitress who forgets his coffee, slays her husband–the manager–who tries to toss him out, and marries the grieving waitress to comfort her.
Strawdog Theatre fights a similarly unsuccessful battle against Berkoff’s writing in its late-night production of his surreal vignette about male- female relations, Lunch. A dreamy mixture of banal dialogue and stream-of-consciousness poetry, this one-act tells of a vaguely erotic encounter between a man and woman at a seaside cafe. Using this simple framework Berkoff takes a decidedly cynical look at the dating game, exploring the unspoken desires that linger behind seemingly unremarkable phrases.
