Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars “A man wrote that,” deadpans Linda Marlowe at the end of a speech by a woman totally in charge of her own destiny. The woman is the Sphinx from Greek, Steven Berkoff’s gobby streetwise update of Oedipus, in which the ferocious Sphinx takes no prisoners, especially if they are men. This is a running theme in Marlowe’s 65-minute compendium of some of Berkoff’s greatest hits in her latest touring version of a show she first performed almost twenty years ago. Given that Marlowe had spent another twenty on and off doing the plays with Berkoff himself, to suggest she’s earned her spurs is something of an understatement. Those spurs are certainly there in the fox-hunting scene from Decadence, in which Marlowe’s character Helen orgasmically taps into the stiff-upper-lip fantasies of a little England that never was, but which currently appear to be in the full throes of a last gasp revival. There are a fair few orgasms here, most of them described

“I’m sort of scared,” says Linda Marlowe of her current revival of Berkoff’s Women, the compendium of monologues by British theatre’s arguably most singular provocateur, which she brings to the Tron Theatre for three nights this weekend. Over the course of the show’s hour-long duration, Marlowe embodies characters from early Berkoff classics including Decadence, Greek, East, Agamemnon, Sturm Und Drang, plus a newly dramatised short story, From My Point of View. Marlowe’s fearless embodiment of Berkoff’s work transforms this into a ferocious set of miniatures, with the text’s rich street-smart poetry flitting between matters of sex and violence as it savours every sweary verbal explosion. Delivered directly to the audience in such an up-close and personal space as the Tron’s Changing Room venue, this makes for an intimate and at moments unsettling experience, with Marlowe, who was a key player in Berkoff’s acting ensemble in the 1970s before joining rad-fem rock theatre troupe The

Perth Theatre Four stars The party is in full swing at the start of Shilpa T-Hyland’s new studio production of Strindberg’s cross-class psycho-sexual power play, dragged into 1920s rural Scotland in Zinnie Harris’s vivid version. Below stairs, alas, Helen Mackay’s maid Christine can only hear the good times going on elsewhere as she stomps her martyr-like way through her chores. When Lorn Macdonald’s flinty fellow servant John bursts in, having effectively gatecrashed a boozy workers’ midsummer do which his young mistress Julie also wafts through, it is with the barricade-hooping zeal of a convert who just found a cause, even as his ambition gets the better of him. The General Strike is on, revolution is in the air and he has a bottle of stolen wine and two women to let down. It is Julie’s similarly tipsy arrival on the scene, however, that really ruffles everybody’s feathers. Set on the clinically clean kitchen of Jen McGinley’s set and bathed in Grant Anderson’s crisp,