Lunch & The Bow of Ulysses, theatre review: Undeniable vividness of language in this Berkoff double-bill

Steven Berkoff’s plays pulse with strange language and a startling physicality, and that’s certainly true of these two 45-minute pieces, revived by Nigel Harman.

In Lunch a man and a woman meet on a pier. Their loneliness is palpable. Lee Newby’s design suggests a seaside idyll, but that impression is quickly dispelled. In fact, the first thing the nameless man says about the woman is that her neck is as soft as a baby’s thigh — he could ‘bite valleys out of it’.

After an initial self-consciousness, they're soon expressing their craving for excitement, frustrations about the sterility of everyday life and an awareness of their darkest desires. They alternate between aggression and submissiveness, fidgety restraint and turbulent fantasy.

In one of his more visceral speeches, the man prattles about the woman's distinctive scent and his quivering nostrils’ unerring detection of her ‘special delicate whiff’. Yet there are moments of higher poetry, and at one point they exchange lines straight out of T S Eliot, pondering the decisions and revisions that constitute their lives, which are at once so passionate and so trivial.

In The Bow of Ulysses, Berkoff revisits the same couple twenty years later. Sitting on the bench where their first encounter happened, they trade sour monologues. As before, there’s a striking difference between their seething thoughts and their actions, which are mostly tentative yet occasionally feral.

Here the woman gets to be at her most brutal, laying bare the emptiness of male desire, while the man complains that her ravenous bloodsucking ways have turned him from a magnificent flower of vitality into ‘an old aspidistra gathering dust in an old, green, Victorian bowl’.

Even if Harman's reverent staging at times feels too static, the vividness of the language is undeniable and he is alert to the mordant peculiarity of the plays’ comedy.

Berkoff’s venomous phrasemaking and confrontational style can be cloying, but there are fearless performances from Emily Bruni, at her best when switching sharply between moods, and Shaun Dooley, who locates the shameful depths of his character’s snarling rage and fumbling tenderness.

Until Nov 5, Trafalgar Studios; atgtickets.com

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