Oedipus without the Freud
Greek
By Steven Berkoff
Directed by Michael Gillett
Designed by Robyn Buschmann
Cast: Richard Lindsell, Hugh Devaney, Jennifer Don and Heather Simpson
The Rep Theatre, Newtown
Reviewed by Angela Matheson
Oedipus killed his father and got into his mum's knickers centuries ago, and the west has been debating the murky implications since. In the Rep's production of Berkoff's Greek, Eddy, the Oedipal hero from post-punk London, smites injustice by killing his Paisley-supporting dad in a cafe and then marries the waitress, who, unbeknownst to him, is his mum.
Eddy, played by hunky Richard Lindsell with a flawless East End accent, is an earthy young man who woos his new wife with a promise to "kiss her bum-hole like it was the lips of cherubs." But, like Oedipus, he finds love is not enough.
Heather Simpson and Hugh Devaney, who play Eddy's adoptive parents, double as a couple of street rats who take us on tour through the polluted wasteland of London, where soccer hooligans roam and members of the National Front march through Brixton. Meanwhile, they tell us, brain-dead regulars from local pubs stagger home to watch videos while political opponents from Northern Ireland are casually slaughtered in the streets.
But the London plague differs from ancient Thebes. In the original, Oedipus faces an apparently implacable cosmos which punishes him and his society. But what he was really up against was a rigid patriarchy which activated nasty power relations — Greek myth is bulging with deadly rivalries between fathers and sons. Sons could come into their own only by killing off dad.
Eddy's wife, played by a Jennifer Don, is no
contested object, no mere symbol. She is a woman of an original mind who chooses Eddy because of his life-affirming qualities and because she has the hots for him.
Don and Lindsell deliver lusty performances as a couple glad to love each other at a time when violence and dreariness plague the bedrooms of London. Their enduring and non-exploitative love affair firmly rams a nail into the Western sexual tradition. Indeed, both Sophocles and Freud get consigned to the scrap heap in this well-directed play, as it is made increasingly clear that male rivalry for the wife/mother is not natural or inevitable.
This production promotes love, sex and passion. It spurns original sin and guilt without intent. The audience's internalised belief that sexuality is tainted is tested by the play's uncompromising sexual imagery — the language is studded with orifices and awash with sexual juices. Mines drift down the Thames like turds and men form queues for hand relief in local saunas "where their spunk is crushed in kleenex" instead of "sweetening the wombs of lovers".
All this is made even better in one of the best value-for-money sets you are likely to see. Designer Robyn Buschmann manages to suggest millennia of mucky oppression with a Greek circle etched on the floor, transposed with a shabby Union Jack. At the corners, barbed wire tangled with broken wood suggests a state of siege. This works beautifully in the round.
Throw in a man-hating, on-the-edge Sphinx (wonderfully acted by Simpson), who grudgingly comes to admire Eddy, and you realise the ancient Greeks really got it wrong.
Of course, the tragedy comes full circle when Eddy discovers who his wife really is. Does he prick his eyes out? "Bollocks", says Eddy as he rejects thousands of years of sexual control and rushes to the woman he fell in love
with and knew "once head first" and now "cock first."