KEY POINTS:
What is it about accents? Paul Gittins and Michael Lawrence are with Jennifer Ward-Lealand in her Grey Lynn lounge, all beautifully enunciating as they consider why people are judged by the way they sound.
Ward-Lealand provides the perfect aural example when she slips from her own voice, warm and cultured, into an East End drawl. It is as if the woman in front of me, elegant even in a casual track-suit, has transmogrified into a working class Londoner sharing her woes over a shandygaff at the local.
This is the illusion Ward-Lealand wants to create. After all, starting tonight, she and Lawrence take to the stage for a play where accents and language are pivotal.
Under Gittins' direction, the duo star in Decadence. Written in 1982 by provocative British playwright-actor-director Steven Berkoff, Decadence is a darkly humorous and sexually charged dissection of the English class system.
Steve and Helen, dubbed upper class by virtue of their "strangulated vowel tones rather than any real achievement", lead a carefree life of indulgence while working class Les and Sybil try to deny their roots to be accepted and get ahead.
Lawrence and Ward-Lealand each perform two characters, meaning they must slip effortlessly between inflections to take audiences from settings as varied as the opera to a fox hunt and an East End living room.
Apart from a designer couch - to be auctioned on TradeMe when the season ends - and two very stylish costumes, the stage will be bare, leaving the two to concentrate on Berkoff's almost lyrical prose.
Ward-Lealand says the "delicious language" is enough to transport audiences providing, of course, she and Lawrence get it right.
There is little chance of the two seasoned theatre professionals making a slip; they have been friends and colleagues for 25 years and know how each other likes to work.
They also know mastering Berkoff, whose work they have performed before, is an art which takes commitment and concentration.
"Six years older and it is getting more difficult to play these characters," chuckles Lawrence, who appeared in Decadence in 2001. "You have to be very fit, very alert for Berkoff. You can't make a mistake or you lose the rhythm of the piece but they are such exciting works to do."
Any thoughts that Decadence is no longer relevant in Blair's Britain - where a supposedly equal opportunity society has been forged - were dealt a blow when Prince William and girlfriend Kate Middleton split.
Commentators blamed the break-up on the "yawning class divide" between the heir to the throne and middle-class Kate whose mother, a former airline stewardess, allegedly committed grievous social sins like chewing gum in public and using words such as "toilet" rather than "lavatory".
Gittins is including quotes from the papers and gossip magazines about William and Kate in the programme for Decadence, saying it proves class prejudice and privilege are alive and the work is as relevant as ever.
"One of the most difficult things about directing Decadence is not allowing the audience to feel too much sympathy for the upper class characters," he says.
"They can become almost charming by virtue of the fact they are so imbued with a 'born to rule' attitude and a kind of naivety results from that."
But Decadence is no simplistic "upper class bad, working class good" narrative. Lawrence says the working classes are held equally accountable for the continued existence of the notorious class system.
ON STAGE
What: Decadence
Where and when: Musgrove Studio, Maidment Theatre, June 27-July 21
