BWW Reviews: KVETCH at The Kings Head Theatre, October 11 2011

I suppose that being saddled with a name that sounds like a lewd act and at least two swear words, Steven Berkoff has always had something to "kvetch" (ie complain) about. Maybe his name's rich potential for earthy comedy also played a part in Berkoff's love of language as a means to reveal the ugliness, the meanness, the absurdity of life.

In his 1986 play "Kvetch" (at The Kings Head Theatre until 4 November)  Berkoff's command of language is put in the service of five characters who, you've got it, kvetch about their lives. Frank (Josh Cole in a performance veering continually between repulsive and attractive) is in a deadend job and a deadend marriage and lusts after a better stereo (this was the 80s) until his lust finds another target.

His wife, Donna (Dagmar Doring) feels equally trapped in the loveless marriage, but is imprisoned by her own insecurities. Her mother (Melissa Woodbridge) farts and belches through dinner - well, it wouldn't be Berkoff without a few bodily functions intervening would it? Into this shattering family enter Hal (Dickie Beau, who brings off his set piece speeches with real elan) and George (Christopher Adlington) - a dead ringer for Stephen King) and slowly, then quickly, the old certainties over which Frank and Donna kvetched and kvetched and kvetched, fall apart.

On a set comprising merely two large tables covered by a couple of white table cloths, all our attention is focused on the characters and the words they use. With a freeze-frame technique that stops the other characters to allow one of the five to say what's really on their mind, the anxieties carefully hidden by the niceties of daily discourse are fully on show with the actors' painted faces enhancing the extremes  - ids now gloriously unconstrained by superegos, as rape and murder fantasies spill out of their mouths.

With echoes of the anxieties suffered by Basil Fawlty and driven by director Julio Maria Martino's relentless pace, Kvetch is an assault on the ears, as much as an assault on the wafer-thin veneer that separates suburban manners from the release of animal instincts. As with all Berkoff's work, it won't please everyone (nor was it intended to) but Kvetch is a fine example of an unmistakeable voice in English theatre. It's genuinely funny too, with a final pay-off that some might see coming, but is no less elegant as a result.

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