Avoid This Playh

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Sheilagh Priestman reviews Steve Burchol's play 'East'. showing at the New London Theatre, in the West End.

One of the delights of the middle class has always been to laugh at the comic and quaint ways of workers.

Big fat ladies with shrimpsized husbands on seaside postcards; Woodbines and curlers: hobnail boots, cloth caps and clogs-funny lot the working class. • Entering a West End theagruesome experience-the audience well groomed and trendily dressed-full of supposedly sparkling ideas and theories about art and culture and life.

The New London surpasses this. The foyer is shared with a smart restaurant and there is great danger of getting entangled with you up to the bar area with elegant furnishings, and halves of lager for 30p served from a stall resembling space module whose shutters descend automatically.

Having survived that ordeal and got inside the theatre-like a carpark with carpets-a worse ordeal was to follow.

This was recommended as a brilliant piece of parody on working class life in East London-in fact it was a piece of titillation for the middle class audience.

The characters were stock figures: Dad in overalls and boots; Sylv, a peroxide tart; two 'bovver boys' and mum, of course wearing scarf, curlers and slippers. Mum was for some reason played by a man, so she looked like the women' in Monty Python.

That was one of the first direct copies from something else, closely followed by the Dad figure being a classic Alf Garnett racist and patriot.

One of the lads worked in boring men's wear shop with an awful employer who forced people into nasty garments just your shade sir' His meaness was well described. But of course this em-1-... Lad to ha Tarl outside the Kangaroo Court last month type in the book was trotted out. Doubtless the author and 'sophisticated' audience saw these as being parodies of something but they were not challenged within the context of the play.

There is no parody in offering the remark that when mum got old 'her tits hung below her mini-skirt'-roars of laughter from the audience.

The play-whose plot is largely irrelevant - was obsessed with the sexual obsessions of its very male and manly young heroes who described with great relish their different sexual exploits, reducing women to a combination of sexual parts.

The young female does protest but only in terms of wishing she was a man.

This simply added to the notion that men and their sexual powers are marvellous and womcn necessarily passive objects who will end un hv heing flahhv. feelingThis sexism dripped from every part of the play, as did its view of the working class as violent and unmannerly people who spit cake out when they speak.

The tone of patronage and insult was so appalling that your reviewer was unable to stay until the end.

Doubtless some trendy twist in the tail at the end attempted to undo the harm done all the way through; but short of turning the house lights on and interrogating the audience as to why they found Jews, blacks, and women and workers so degradingly amusing, there was no redemption possible.

Obscene

There is something fundamentally obscene about the 'workers' being offered up-to middle class theatre goers to titillate and amuse them.

Avoid this play!

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