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"Under
the direction of Zaib Shaikh, this is an excellent,
fast-paced production..." |
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"...exciting
young actors...Director Zaib Shaikh deserves accolades..." |
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"...the
actors move with the precision of Noh performers..." |
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".....Steven Berkoff on Greek from The Theatre of Steven Berkoff, by Stephen Berkoff, 1992...... Greek was my love poem to the spirit of Oedipus over the centuries. I ransacked the entire legend. So this is not simply an adaptation of Sophocles but a recreation of the various Oedipus myths which seemed to apply, particularly to a play about what I saw London had become. London equals Thebes and is full of riots, filth, decay, bombings, football mania, mobs at the palace gates, plague madness and post-pub depression. |
The play dealt with the idea of an emotional, social plague apart from the actual biological one - that I saw was eating away at the heart of this nation. It was staged simply in the usual stripped-down style I would, for want of a better term, call functionalist. The actors’ white faces were like masks of Greek statues. The table became a stage in itself and the family the Greek Chorus for each other and also playing all the roles. Barry Philips played the Eddy/Oedipus role and did it with brilliant, laconic humour. Matthew Scurfield's Dad was a tour de force of the first order, while Linda Marlowe played Jocasta/Wife as perfectly as I would dare hope, giving the lines full meaning and emotion. | Greek came to me via Sophocles, trickling its way down the millennia until it reached the unimaginative- wastelands of Tufnell Park - a land more fantasized than real, an amalgam of the deadening war zones that some areas of London have become. It was also a love story." | ||||
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