Review: LUNCH AND THE BOW OF ULYSSES, Trafalgar Studios 2, 10 October 2016

Seasides are transgressive places: dirty weekends, crazy architecture and an untamed sea clawing at the shore create possibilities not accessible at home or inland. There's the whiff of opportunity in the air (fighting off the pervasive aroma of candy floss and fried food no doubt) when Tom is smitten by Mary, he killing time in a nothing job, she killing time on a pier, seagulls circling above, shrieking. Lunch tracks how their relationship begins and The Bow Of Ulysses updates it 20 years on - presented consecutively by director Nigel Harman, they bookend two decades that start with lust and desire and finish with rancour and disappointment.

But that's not what this all-through, 90-minute tour-de-force is really about - it's about writer Steven Berkoff and his fizzing, spitting, spinning language. Mixing poetry, soliloquies, dream sequences, flights of fancy and some eye-poppingly frank observations on a married life gone sour, Berkoff picks you up and tosses you about, like a discarded chip wrapper caught on a sea breeze, the words soaring then plunging - well, I'm getting a bit Berkhoff-like myself now!

Though he lacks the K of Sir Ken or the Bn. of Lord Larry (if offered such baubles, I would expect Berkoff's reply to rhyme with his name), the Stepney boy, whose work has taken him to Hollywood and back, has done just as much on stage and screen as Branagh and Olivier and navigated the tricky line between the ultra-commercial (he has been a Bond villain) and the avant-garde (his work often described as Beckettian - although it's much better known than Samuel Beckett's). Written 20 years apart, these two plays catch Berkoff in a more accessible mood than is sometimes the case, less sweary, more contemplative - and he's all the better for it.

With scripts like these, the performers need to maintain one foot in the naturalism camp while the other can leap into the realms of self-deception, psychosis and delusion. Emily Bruni, often tight-lipped and stiff at the couple's first meeting, but yielding just enough to show her willingness to meet Shaun Dooley's carnal desires halfway, is excellent. She comes into her own in the second play, the cruel dissection of her (now) husband's pathetic life at work, at home and in bed, deadpanned to hilarious effect, more than a touch of Dandy Nichols' Else Garnett in her delivery. The words may come out of the side of the mouth, but they go straight to the heart where they hurt.

In Lunch, Dooley physically embodies his emotional turmoil, as his Tom falls for Mary, his blood boiling, his libido unleashed. He prowls, makes eye contact with the audience and barely avoids doing it right here right now, so overcome is he with lust, articulated through word and deed. Twenty years on, in Bow, all that has been flattened out by the mundanities of family life and his wife's initial indifference, curdling over time into a disinterested loathing, now made manifest with the kids off running their own lives. He sits, manspreading the legs, seemingly heavier now, whinging, but somehow, perhaps because we know the joy he once felt, still sympathetic as a character.

Though there are serious views put forward about the way so many men and women grow apart, plenty of laugh out loud moments of comedy and wince-inducing tirades of cruelty, it is the Berkoffian (there - used it) language that propels this pair of two-handers - the voice unlike any other, like a gale off a sea, salty and bracing.

Lunch and The Bow Of Uylsses continue at the Trafalgar Studios 2 until 5 November.

Read our interview with Nigel Harman

Photo Marc Brenner.

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