The Mechanicals, an invigorated, new repertory company, have launched their season of British plays with a quality production of Steven Berkoff’s misanthropic, 1981 satire, Decadence.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Berkoff’s relatively well-known (I can recall at least two hit local productions, and there is a 1994 cult film starring Joan Collins and Berkoff himself) savage lampooning of the British ruling class might have dated. Certainly the profanity and the obscenity amuse more than shock. Yet given the brink of disaster global capitalism has brought the world, the play has a new life, for Berkoff is poetically anatomising here the rapacious mentality that motivated the spawn of Thatcher (or ‘Maggot Scratcher’ as Berkoff named her), the consequences of whose behaviour we live with today. As Thatcher infamously put it: “There is no such thing as society”.
Precisely mannered and brilliantly choreographed by director Christopher Weare, Scott Sparrow and Emily Child play two couples, the cockney Sibyl and Les, and the upper class Steve and Helen. Divided by the class structure, they ironically nonetheless mirror each other in their avarice and pornographic egomania.
Sparrow, a graduate of the school of Buckland, has the right physicality for Berkoff’s highly stylized mode of theatre, and he copes well with the upper class glottis. Child is more at her ease as Sibyl, but triumphs in that fail-safe scene, the fox hunt as sadomasochistic sex. It truly is as Wilde said, ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’.
