Arts: Theatre: Head-banging two cultures

EAST VAUDEVILLE THEATRE LONDON

DAD'S CHIP-filled belly is so vast it dominates the family dinner- table. He smashes his invective home with an HP sauce bottle, invoking Oswald Mosley with passion as he revels in a sinisterly homely anti-Semitism. Around him, the family has stopped listening. The boys are revving up for their next shag, while Mum (cursed with the charisma of a dishmop) is dusting haplessly, absorbed in her own grey dreams.

Steven Berkoff's East was first performed at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in 1975. Almost 25 years on, he has proved as a director that the play can still burn with its original furious comic energy. From the moment when a beam lights up the stereotypical, old-fashioned working class silhouettes - Mum's curlers trapped in a headscarf, Sylv's sprightly peroxide pony- tail, Les and Mike's jaws stuck out firm with blind defiance - it is clear that the audience is going to have the humour thrust down its throat Berkoff- style. Soon Matthew Cullum and Christopher Middleton are making you laugh with the kind of facial expressions and movements that leave cartoonists no room for improvisation, while Mum, Dad, and Sylv provide a chorus of ruefully animated apathy.

The plot is simple - Les and Mike have both slept with the same "bird" (Sylv) and, after shedding each other's blood copiously, have bonded in shag-obsessed brotherhood. Their accounts of their adventures and conquests are set against a claustrophobic working-class world, with Mum and Dad sucked into blinkered fantasies.

The play famously mixes elements of Greek drama, Shakespeare and classical music references with East End gobbiness - you can almost see Berkoff gleefully bashing the heads of high and low culture together. The evening is guaranteed to knock you off your polite perch with admiration and laughter.

Rachel Halliburton