Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Michael Lawrence... give a master class in acting that makes for must-see theatre.
...a gourmet experience for the theatre connoisseur.
Shannon Huse, NZ Herald
This is a production of international standard. Both Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Michael Lawrence are virtuosi, each with death-defying courage and nerves of steel.
Larry Jenkins, gaynz.com
Decadence at Musgrove Studio
By Shannon Huse
New Zealand Herald
The 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death gives Decadence at the Musgrove Studio a timely, even salacious, relevance. Any other time it would be easy to question the relevance to a New Zealand audience of Steven Berkoff's wickedly funny polemic on the English class system. But now, newspapers, magazines and books are full of discussions of the class system, Diana's legacy and her effect on the most upper of upper classes, the royal family. If our ongoing fascination with Diana proves anything it is that we love hearing about our betters behaving badly, a theme that Berkoff investigates to great comic effect in Decadence.
The play focuses on two couples at either end of the class system through a series of entertaining vignettes. Steve and Helen are a posh pair who live for opera, hunting, gourmet excesses and their illicit affair. Meantime, Steve's new-money wife Sybil is stuck at home with her thoughts of revenge and her lower class lover Les, originally hired as a private detective.
Both couples are played by Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Michael Lawrence who give a master class in acting that makes for must-see theatre. Their accents, physicality and characterisation are pretty much faultless; a joy for an audience to watch and an inspiration for wannabe actors. Specific highlights include a sexy explanation of the thrill of a fox hunt and a guide to getting drunk.
While Decadence features plenty of laughs, Berkoff had a more serious intent in writing it. He sought to show the ruling classes at their worst, highlighting their lack of any real achievement, their pleasure from sado masochistic activity such as hunting, their infantilism and lack of emotional maturity.
The only trouble is he makes the posh life look like so much more fun than the dreary striving and hard graft of the middle and lower classes. Yes, Helen and Steve are grotesque but they would make for far more amusing drinking partners than the bitter and boring Les and Sybil.
Decadence is not an easy, naturalistic sitcom-style play. It is a more theatrical experience that will be an acquired taste for many, thanks to Berkoff's use of mime and his rich language that combines Shakespearean flourishes and rhyming couplets with dirty street talk.
With such evocative language at his disposal and two fantastic actors to make it real, director Paul Gittins focuses on the performers and keeps the design flourishes to a minimum. John Parker's set design of raised floor, ornate couch and chandelier is well balanced and works well, providing plenty of surfaces for the characters to abuse. Andrew Malmo's lighting is fine in many scenes but the use of red light in the hunting scene seems cliched and at odds with the overriding theme of the monologue, which is more about sex than death.
Decadence may not have wide appeal, but it is a gourmet experience for the theatre connoisseur. It's the theatrical equivalent of gorging on oysters, blood-red steak, garlic beans, wine poached pears, oozing stilton cheese, vintage champagne and dry martinis - so richly satisfying you almost feel queasy.
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Strong artistic study of cross-class desperation
Nik Smythe
TheatreView
All minimalist appearances aside, this is richly detailed and textured work due to the well defined physicality of the players, and its constantly poetic word play. At first it's a bit like hearing very British people talking jive, but once the style is established it takes on a kind of naturally abstract flow.
Our beloved princess, if not queen, of theatre in New Zealand, the magnificent Jennifer Ward-Lealand, brings all her power and presence and legs to her dual roles as the affluent Helen, a highly affected, disturbingly hollow mistress to the wayward husband of her other character, Sybil, the long-suffering cockney lass who married up from her underclass roots.
Burly Kiwi drama workhorse Michael Lawrence displays similar remarkable transformational skill, switching between said adulterous toffee-nosed tosser Steve, and Les the gruff cockney detective hired to tail Steve by Sybil, whom he is also shagging. Not so much a rough diamond is Les, than a hunk of crumbling granite.
Paul Gittins' direction engages the force of these two veterans' substantial abilities, achieving optimum levels of passion, disaffection, indulgence, frustration, excitement and trauma. Nothing is specifically sad, nor joyous. No clear moral arises. It's just the way it is.
John Parker may appear to have had an easy job; besides the players' duly spiffy his & hers duds and Ward Lealand's fabulous hairdo, the set consists of a raised platform with a sofa, excuse me, couch in the centre, and a chandelier glowing above. All props, including the chain-smoked cigarettes, are mimed, thereby not hindering the instantaneous scene changes, whilst hinting at the unreality of the things we own and consume, by which our existence is defined. But how long did it take Parker to source such an utterly perfect, gauchely elegant white leopard skin couch* and such an ideal and quietly extravagant crystal chandelier?
Decadence first premiered in 1981, the year of Charles and Diana's historic wedding. This leads me to wonder, when Steve the toff greets Charles and Camilla at the opera, is this an updated line or an original biting reference to the pervading infidelities of the aristocracy?
According to playwright Stephen Berkoff, the play is "a study of the ruling classes ... so called by virtue of strangulated vowel tones than any real achievement", suggesting the presence of Sybil and Les in the story, like any real-life counterparts, is simply to serve the story of Steve and Helen. However the formers' final soliloquies, in which Les laments his own despised lot and Helen relays something of a manual for working class gold diggers, sum up the ultimate impact of such a system, to which the toffs are blissfully ignorant.
Is this extreme class separation even topical today, or merely a retrospective exploration? I daresay if the class system as we know it did decline and expire, the royal family may take much longer than everyone else to realise it. An extract by Kim Murphy in the Los Angeles Times, included in the programme, argues that indeed the British class system is alive and well, indeed back with a vengeance in the cited case of William's split from Kate Middleton due to her allegedly being way too middle class. That said, being middle class I feel somewhat underrepresented in this essay of the struggles and escapades of the haves and have nots. Perhaps we're too busy paying most of the taxes to have anything relevant or interesting to contribute. Ironically the middle class will most probably comprise the great majority of Decadence's box office.
Those enamoured of the title will not be left wanting for truly, utterly, disgustingly decadent moments as they pervade the discourse throughout. The closing image of Helen and Steve echoes the inner corruption of Dorian Gray, and ultimately the heights of decadence of both the toffs and the oiks are apparently indulged to quell the same underlying existential desperation.
Whether or not this is news to you, Decadence is a strong artistic work from some of this country's most worthy leading practitioners.
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The colourful language of ‘Decadence’
By Larry Jenkins
gay.nz.com
Steven Berkoff, for those who haven't heard of him, was seen as the anarchist of British theatre in the seventies and eighties. His plays in those days, performed by the London Theatre Group, which he founded in 1968, usually had one-word titles: “East”, “West”, “Greek”, “Decadence”, but occasionally expanded to three: “Sink the Belgrano”, “Sturm und Drang”. All were iconoclastic, all were savage pokes at the society in which he still lives, laced with a unique brand of venom that often leaves audiences stupefied with laughter – or horror. As an actor, too, his rebellious energy always coloured performances as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II and, most particularly, as Coriolanus.
“Decadence” on one level can be considered a diatribe against the British class system, on another a ridiculing of the lower classes, on another an exercise in verbage so clever and overwhelming it actually brings on nausea and a headache. The “f” word, the “c” word, and every other provocative word appear over and over and over and over, and in verse, in the tradition of Moliere, the playwright Berkoff most often brings to mind. If his plays fit into accepted genre, then farce is the category. I can remember being stunned and shocked by this onslaught of pornographic language when I saw “Decadence” in its first season. The effect of it now, twenty odd years later, is almost as suffocating. But it's not only the syntax, it's the effect of being constantly bombarded with more information than we need to know about Steve/Les and Helen/Sybil – and not for a minute being able to get away from it, nor wanting to. The play takes on an organic character which slowly mesmerizes and devours its audience, as does its eponymous state of being.
Paul Gittens has the measure of his playwright and his actors. This is a production of international standard. Both Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Michael Lawrence are virtuosi, each with death-defying courage and nerves of steel. In all of the set-pieces that, while seemingly carrying forward the thin plot, actually push the performers to the absolute edge, the pair are in complete control while appearing to abandon sanity. The famous hunt scene, with Jennifer astride Michael as her “steed” driving him in orgiastic frenzy, her mane flying, eyes blazing, ejaculating bloodthirsty obscenities like some unhinged Valkyrie as she closes in for the kill, has to be experienced to be believed. The actual amount of energy this piece requires must leave the performers prostrate afterwards. If I have a quibble, as the upper class pair, the actors could be a little more laconic.
Andrew Malmo's lighting and John Parker's couch onstage (being flogged off at the end or the run) were the only accoutrements, oh, and some subtle sound effects. “Decadence” is stripped back to language, though, conversely, as a radio play it wouldn't work. It is a work for the stage (though it has been filmed with Joan Collins and Berkoff) and one needs to see the action and the faces of the characters.
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