Photo: Jesse Kramer
In 2005, when Harold Pinter (1930-2008) belatedly received the Nobel Prize for literature, his work was at the time embarrassingly absent from the London stage. Since the award, enthusiasm has renewed for his early plays in his hometown, where one has seen stunning revivals of The Birthday Party, The Hothouse and A Slight Ache among others.
Happily for Cape Town, The Mechanicals, “pioneering the resurrection of repertory theatre”, have followed suit. In their ‘British Lines’ season they had a crack at The Birthday Party, and seem to have nailed The Dumb Waiter (premiered 1960), Pinter’s absurd yet riveting black comedy about two working class hit men awaiting orders (those who have seen Martin McDonagh’s film In Bruges will experience some déjà vu).
The hired guns discover a dumb waiter in their room; trap-like, one expects it at any moment to guillotine off one of their hands. When a series of peculiar requests for food arrive via the small lift, the two paranoid men desperately try to make sense of their situation. It’s a study in being at the butt end of arbitrary instruction and malevolent power.
Directed by Luke Ellenbogen, Guy de Lancey’s taciturn Ben, for whom murder is all in a day’s work, is particularly well-observed. Nicholas Pauling is suitably cast as the nervous, restless, malcontent junior, Gus. On opening night the actors didn’t always trust the script as implicitly as they should, but overall we are most fortunate to have the opportunity to see Pinter’s extraordinary talent this well served.
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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’.
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