At least Purgatory is short. It’s 25 minutes mostly of Shakespeare soliloquies delivered by the character of John (played by Ben Rath and Harrison Booth at alternate performances), an actor who’s renting a room from landlady Betty (Chloe Ray). Enter Sarah, played by Bethanie Hayes as a cross between Professor Trelawny from the Harry Potter films, and Lavender Brown from the Harry Potter films. She’s immediately attracted to John for…some reason, and maybe he’s bewildered by her attention, or maybe he actually likes her back. It’s not specified. Meanwhile, Betty’s pestering John for his rent (despite him only having arrived twenty minutes ago, another baffling contrivance), and their other neighbour Ted (Myles Lovell) randomly wanders in to holler expletives at them. It all hangs together extremely loosely, with limited narrative. The humour is broad, the performances caricature. There are jokes, but few of them land. It says a lot that Ray’s covering of a technical fault was the funniest moment for me.
Berkoff’s next play, Dahling You Were Marvellous, is a satire about the entertainment industry. With over 25 characters, it is massively overly-stuffed and bemusing. None of the hugely exaggerated characters have room to breathe, resulting in an exhausting evening (the play also ran almost twenty minutes over its projected hour run-time). A smorgasbord of anachronistic references throughout Dahling You Were Marvellous make its location and decade unclear, which weakens the satire as it has nothing more specific than “the entertainment industry in general,” to sink its teeth into. Berkoff shoves a mass of tangled plot threads into the play, most of which are sporadic and lacking in setup (it concludes, randomly, with everybody being evacuated due to a riot). He relies heavily on cheap gags about sex, coke, and bodily functions, none of which are funny enough to withstand the many times they’re repeated. Some performances would be passable in a play with a better script, but many are torturously over-the-top, and the hodgepodge of accents adopted by the cast doesn’t help either. Maybe Dahling You Were Marvellous was conceived as a series of vignettes, but really it just seems like a jumble of mismatched scenes.
Perhaps Berkoff and his team (Troupe 22 Theatre Company, directed by Bethanie and Aaron Hayes) are capable of smart, funny, comedies with an actual story, though you wouldn’t think so from viewing either of these tedious, unfunny messes. Watching them was like spending an evening in actual Purgatory- boring, uncomfortable, and waiting desperately to leave.
Dahling You Were Marvellous & Purgatory play at Golden Goose Theatre until 9 August.
