Steven Berkoff Double Bill, at South Street Arts Centre, Tuesday 22 August 2006. With this being the premiere performance by new Reading theatre group Lemon Cake Theatre there was an air of interested expectation and an awareness that allowances should be made – the first performance of the first production is always a test-bed. | "The only worry is what they will do next to follow such a strong debut as this." | |
But if this is indicative of what Lemon Cake can do then it's hard to see exactly how they are going to improve on this initial outing, because already everything seems to be in place. The two Berkoff pieces on show are a linked pair, Lunch (1983) and The Bow Of Ulysses (2001), which examine the relationship between a couple (Tom and Mary) when they first meet and have, what appears to be, an abortive one-night-stand, and how they are 20 years later after two decades of marriage. As with anything by Berkoff the writing is intense, weighty and physical. Not to mention voluminous. In the first piece, which is astounding in the way it mixes dialogue, soliloquy, fantasy, thought, commentary all in a single thread of non-stop conversation. The action moves from what is the epiphanous love-at-first-sight moment, through beautiful nervous tentative reachings-out, to the sounding brass of impressive swagger and boastfulness. Berkoff's writing is astounding in its unrelenting physicality. Yet it skips from Shakespearian verbosity, allusion and surprising imagery to tip-toeing indecision akin to the balcony scene in Coward's Private Lives. All without losing its footing. As a framework underneath this roiling and elusive dialogue is a highly stylised acting – using a repertoire of gesture and dance-like movement that keeps everything at one remove from reality. It works beautifully and the peculiar decision to underline or emphasise certain of Mary's words with snatches of what appeared to be British Sign Language was intriguing and powerful. The second piece, The Bow Of Ulysses, is quite different in shape and style. It avoids any hint at conversation, with each character speaking in long soliloquies, before passing the baton to the other. He feels he has wasted twenty years married to her, she believes he'd have been nothing without her support. The truth, as truth always is, is more complicated and the sides switch around and explore one another, without ever touching in conversation. Again this is stylised and entirely effective. At one point, as a declaration of love, Tom says "Listening to you I hear the music. Following you I climb the mountain". There in two phrases are love, devotion, the difficulty and inevitability of it summed up. But of course, Tom doesn't leave it there, he pushes home his disappointments, until eventually, in truly Berkoffian style, he is left hunkered down, small, insignificant and roundly emasculated. But Mary hasn't won either, because love isn't a competition. At all times one has the feeling that perhaps nothing is actually being said, that these soliloquies are nothing more than that – streams of internal thought – that come the morning, come later on that day they'll curl up together to watch the telly, or go to the pictures. There is little Elizabeth Monaghan and Keith Bumstead could have done better in their roles, they were confident, funny, tragic, beautiful and moved together with a chemistry that quite crackled at times. The only worry is what they will do next to follow such a strong debut as this. | 
