Review: Lunch and The Bow of Ulysses (Trafalgar Studios 2)

Two short Berkoff plays – Lunch, written in 1983, and The Bow of Ulysses, from 2002 – are here revived together. Makes sense: the first play is the initial encounter between a man and woman, while the second revisits them after spent 20 years together.

Not that it’s exactly charting a shift from romantic optimism to world-weariness, a Before Sunrise/Before Midnight situation: the first hook-up is less meet-cute than creep-out. A man sees a woman on a bench on a pier looking out to sea; he tries to pluck up the courage to speak to her, and we hear his inner desperate desires as well as the feeble overtures he actually manages. Shaun Dooley‘s rubber-faced, spittle-flecked, highly physical performance shows him as nervous yet also nauseatingly slobbery. Emily Bruni, meanwhile, is excellently stony-faced, imperious and seemingly impervious, but we hear her inner monologue willing him to make the move too.

Another playwright might have made a neat little comedy out of this, but Berkoff’s weird, densely-poetic, ickily visceral writing is soon soaring off in various overwrought directions. The man froths and foams, first in lust over the woman and then into rages about his unfulfilled life as a salesman. But under Nigel Harman‘s direction, it’s never quite clear enough what’s wild internal monologue, and what the other can actually hear; without letting the audience in on the joke, this gap in knowledge, the comedy often doesn’t work.

A psycho-sexual struggle for power commences, but in a week where we’re hearing quite so much about men groping women, the man’s feverish pawing leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The production ultimately insists that – despite her refusals and caustic insults – the woman is actually gagging for a bit of rough on the pier, that this is their role-play. But all the handsiness combined with endless verbose descriptions of her "satin-lined corridors" and skin "like a baby’s thigh" just left me feeling a bit queasy.

The writing of The Bow of Ulysses is more matured, more settled – just like its couple. But this hasn’t been a happy marriage. Still on that bench, but now static and simply delivering monologues, the pair moan on about the relationship.

"You took the best years of my life," whines the man, before riffing at comically absurd length about how he wasted his "ripeness" – his ability to sleep around – by being in a relationship with her, "like an old aspidistra gathering dust." She, meanwhile, claims that she "saved his life from meaninglessness and emptiness", forcing him to connect rather than just seeing women as a collection of orifices, or a nice safe womb to crawl back into (hey, Freud!) Wincingly, they ultimately conclude they stayed together because of "remote control buttons": only one of them knows how to work the Sky box; another, the video player.

You don’t need to have been stuck in a resentful marriage for 20 years to recognise the insight of much of this; Berkoff’s writing is sinewy, muscular, unafraid of being nasty in service of a truth. There’s impressive reservoirs of bile here, but listening to people being this vile about each other also just gets pretty boring pretty quickly.

Lunch and the Bow of Ulysses runs at Trafalgar Studios 2 until 5 November.