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East

by Steven Berkoff

Aggro Theatre
review by Michael Scott Moore in SF Weekly (December 16, 1998)
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Show, Don’t Feel

East. By Steven Berkoff. Directed by Nicholas
Helfrich. Starring Beth Mann, Shane Nestor, Ellen
Scarpaci, John McNally, and Kevin Kelleher. At Exit
Stage Left, 156 Eddy (at Mason), through Dec. 19.
Call 673-3847.

If you’d grown up with a last name that rhymed with “jerk off,”
you too might have developed a savage and exaggerated
playwriting style. And you might create violently conflicted
characters who yell at the audience and often get around, in their
monologues, to miming some kind of sex act.

This seems to be the case with Steven Berkoff. The author of
Kvetch and East has no use for subtlety. Earlier this year Berkoff
himself performed in drag at the Edinburgh Fringe premiere of his
new show Massage and sent people fleeing for the door. One
critic wrote, “The first time Berkoff mimed a hand-job on an
imaginary penis three or four feet long, culminating in a mimed
fountain, it was mildly amusing, but by the time he’d done it half a
dozen times ....”

East, however, in spite of a few hand jobs, is a pretty good play,
and the current production -- by an aptly named new troupe called
the Aggro Theater Company -- has a compelling, sinister energy.
The story deals with Les and Mike, two young men in London’s
East End who compete for an unfaithful woman called Sylv.
Mike’s parents are a pair of exaggerated lower-middle-class
horrors who don’t seem to realize that Mike is a criminal thug; Les
sells cheap men’s suits. Dialogue is cockney, and the characters
and charged rhyming slang may remind you of A Clockwork
Orange, a film in which Berkoff actually had a role shortly before
writing this play.

“It’s soft and hard at the same time,” Mike says, of a knife hitting
flesh. “It gives you the collywobbles of thrilldom.” Kevin Kelleher
plays him in white makeup with bright red eye sockets, resembling
Mephistopheles or something from Cabaret, and not for a single
moment does he step out of character to show a soft or
sympathetic side, but fills himself with venom and spits it at the
audience, which is just right.

The problem with the play is that Berkoff develops his characters
by giving them speeches, rather than something to do. The sheer
weight of narration would sink the story if the language weren’t so
vivid. (Les describes his co-worker at the suit shop not just as
bored, but with “boredom pourin’ down on him like yellow piss.”)
The most important scenes -- like a disturbing one in a cinema
between Mike and his mom -- are acted out as well as narrated,
and the acting-out is so effective you wish there were more of it.
The cast renders Mike’s motorcycle ride and a trip to an
amusement park in spare and whimsical movement; Mike’s dad
relives a war story he tells by dying on the dinner table.

There are too many monologues, well-performed as they are. But
there isn’t too much music -- sometimes the cast bursts into song,
backed by a live piano -- and the unrelenting chaos of East makes
it wicked, horrible fun.

— Michael Scott Moore

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