East

Synopsis

The story of East centres on a group of East-End rough-necks as they exist in a world of violence, brutality and dark humour. With it's uncompromising physical performance style, superb comic timing, sustained energy, physical control and it's rich poetic language veering from Shakespearean parody to the shatteringly profane, East is a rollercoaster of gripping theatricality, teeming with both visual and verbal exuberance. This production contains explicit language and is not suitable for those who are easily offended.

Our Review:

12 March 2009

Thirty-five years after its premiere, Steven Berkoff’s first original play returns to its spiritual homeland as part of the 3rd annual East Festival. Goldrush Entertainment’s full-blooded production of East relishes the heightened visceral language of Berkoff’s ‘punk-Shakespearean’ verse, embodied in a highly physical performance style which keeps this play alive and kicking today.

With no set design and no story to speak of, the attention is very much on the personalities of the five EastEnders who reveal the desires and frustrations which dominate their daily existence, with the cast sitting on chairs at the back of the stage before coming forward to interact with each other or more often give in yer face monologues direct to the audience.

Mike and Les are two young bloods revelling in parodic macho posturing, who find the only escape from their dead-end lives in casual sex or violence, each of which seems to give them equal...

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Latest User Review

Cathy Warwick - 10 March 2009:

The energetic performances of the actors live up to the energy of Steven Berkoff's angry and affecting drama. Berkoff's dialogue and physicality forces his actors to work hard, and the dedicated troupe at the Courtyard rise to the occasion. Director Fela Oke makes a virtue of propless minimalism, demanding creative initiative from the actors who deliver talented performances in mime and physical drama and engage the imagination of the audience. Particular mention should be made of the 'Method Acting' of one of the play's young stars, Joshua Nawras, who got into a fight to help him 'get into character' and was sporting an impressive and authentic black eye on the first night. Partly autobiographical, 'East' draws on Berkoff's own East End background to demand respect for working class culture. As an 'Elegy for the East and Its Energetic Waste' it is truly effective as a mournful requiem for wasted lives which, lived with such energy, should have been worth so much more and yielded much more joy. These honest poor folk, Berkoff seemed to be saying back then in the 1970s, are the truly deserving, whereas privilege is wasted on the cowardly rich who haven't the brains or the balls to properly enjoy their good fortune. With homage to Kubrick and Orton, unrepressed proletarian sexuality and violence is flung honestly in the disquieted faces of 'cultivated' audiences. Using Shakespearean language and a lyrical approach that paradoxically beautifies crudity, Berkoff humorously dramatises the aggrandisement of the crude sex and violence which enlivens restricted and wasted existences. The painful gulf between aspiration and actuality is continually re-revealed in one disappointing episode after another: the poetic and imaginative courtship speeches followed by the perfunctory bunk-up; the unrequited longings and higher yearnings thwarted by cultural constraints; the intelligent mother repressed and brutalised, reacting with courageous good humour to the accidental incest (very funny!) which is the only glimmer of light relief in her typically bleak experience of marriage. The characters' attitudes alternate between aggressive contempt for the effete cowardices and self-deceptions of 'social superiors', and pathos as they confront the bleak reality of human existence, while laughing bravely in its face. ...

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