Performance: Decadence

Maidment Studio

Reviewer: Susan Budd


"Decadence," says playwright Steven Berkoff, "is a study of the ruling classes or upper classes, so called by virtue of strangulated vowel tones rather than any real achievement."

Set in Thatcherite Britain, the play contrasts two couples. One is upper-class, playing and consuming with utter abandon; the other is working-class, their lives corroded by resentment because of their inability to escape entrapment at the base of a rigid class system.

Berkoff's rage is contained within rhyming couplets that are packed with coruscating wit and savagery.

Decadence is both sexy and appallingly funny as it skewers its characters' prejudices and pretensions with emotionally charged language and imagery.

Michael Lawrence and Sally Spencer-Harris give scintillating performances in a superb double- act.

With immaculate timing and high-octane energy, they leap through Berkoff's obstacle course like thoroughbred horses, marking the transition from Steve and Helen's glottal drawl and elegant indolence to the cockney whine and hungry mating of Les and Sybil with stylish economy.

The set-piece scene of Helen mounted upon her stallion, Steve, as she re-enacts the glories of fox hunting is erotic and comic, while a scathing indictment of the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.

It is hard to find enough superlatives for Lawrence's performance. He establishes character with an imperceptible and instantaneous change of posture and is absolutely in control of the intricacies of the dialogue.

His racist paean to patriotism, his salivating descriptions of gourmet food made more delicious the greater the suffering of the creatures tortured for its concoction, and tales of the bliss of schoolboy buggery are all masterfully delivered.

Spencer-Harris' transition from Helen to Sybil displays more effort, but her Helen is consummately stylish and sublimely selfish and manipulative.

She moves beautifully and her soliloquies are wittily and intelligently delivered.

Paul Gittins' production is strong and deceptively simple.

He choreographs the tortuous progression of the characters with clarity and style, allowing them, even as satiric types, some humanity. They are not sympathetic, but they become almost understandable.

John Parker's set displays the same simplicity and elegance, and Andrew Malmo's multitudinous lighting cues smoothly set the scene.