STAGE REVIEW : Berkoff’s ‘East’ Comes West, With an East London Drawl

“Donate a snout, Mike?”

“OK. I’ll bung thee a snout, Les.”

“Now you know our names,” say Mike and Les, in unison, launching the latest Steven Berkoff play to hit Los Angeles.

Well, latest only in a manner of speaking. “East,” at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, first saw stage lights at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975 and hit London’s Greenwich Theatre the year after. So it’s not exactly hot off the presses.

But it is pure early Berkoff, meaning Berkoff raw, written as it is in this playwright’s signature East Londonese--a potent (and not always felicitous) stew of barely penetrable vernacular, decorated with an abundance of Shakespearean “thees” and “thous.” Anyone who saw L.A. Theatre Works’ memorable production of Berkoff’s “Greek” in 1982 will have no trouble recognizing the jargon.

Understanding it, however, is another matter. In spite of a program glossary and a clear, powerful, hyper-kinetic production staged by Barry Philips (who appeared in the original “East”), don’t expect to follow this piece word for word. Not unless you grew up in East London.

What you’ll catch is the drift and it’s almost enough. As with “Greek,” we have the actors sitting in chairs all in a row or at a dinner table (Berkoff’s plays are rarely about sets and this one’s no exception). There’s Mum (Peter Frankland) and Dad (Bradley Armacost) and Mike (Robert Thaler) and Sylv (Sadie Chrestman) and Les (Jon Matthews). Relationships are a bit muddy and border on the incestuous. As in “Greek,” they speak in what one can only term arias: Actors, each in turn, stepping out of the action and delivering long, extraordinarily dense and lyrical monologues.

Fascinating. Enervating. Assaultive. Exhausting. “East” is a test of endurance--for the actors certainly (and these, to a man and woman, are real champs), but for the audience too. Sitting through it means sitting through a relentless barrage of quasi-foreign language drenched in vituperation--a thick pudding of unvarnished “sprach” (speech) about “muckas” and “chinas” (chums) “bundling” (fighting) and carrying on about “talents” (good-looking women) and “scrubber-slagheads” (floozies) and their sexual exploits.

Dinner with this family isn’t exactly a picnic, either. Not when Dad drowns his face in the baked beans (which doesn’t deter son Mike from having a second helping) and family fun is had by everyone spraying everyone else with whatever they happen to be chewing at the time.

That’s the easy part.

Simulated sex and sexual comedy are there too, grotesquely funny and sad, and a certain graphic lyricism, such as a densely packed speech by Mike detailing female parts he has known and loved.

Whatever else “East” may be, it is honest, crude, explosive and direct. Berkoff’s program notes ring scrupulously true when he states that the play “was written to exorcise certain demons within me struggling to escape” and that it is “less a biographical text than an outburst of revolt against the sloth of my youth and a desire to turn a welter of undirected passion and frustration into a positive form” or that “East could be the east side of any city.” How well we know.

By the same token, “East” is not for the squeamish. Or the impatient. For all its uncontested impact, the vividness of its energy, color and humor, “East” could stand to be shorter by at least 30 minutes. As it is now, it runs a compressed, uninterrupted, deliberately airless two hours without respite. There is no intermission--there never is with Berkoff, who either considers such breaks disruptive or merely a waste of time.

But it’s an amazing piece--not quite in the same league with “Greek,” which threw such a fascinating slant on a very old tale, but not far behind. It will have its detractors and the people who simply will have trouble coping with the bluntness of its realism and language--whatever part of it they’re able to understand.

For them, we say caveat emptor. But others, surely, will find the poetry that filters in through the prurience, and will recognize this scruffy, unruly, rebellious work as the notable early manifestation of one of the English-speaking theater’s truest originals.

At 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. in West Los Angeles, Thursdays and Fridays, 8:30 p.m.; Saturdays, 9:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Indefinitely. Tickets: $14.50-$18.50; (213) 477-2055.

A GLOSSARY FOR BERKOFF’S ‘EAST’ In presenting “East,” Steven Berkoff’s play about growing up in the East End of London, the Odyssey Theatre has put a glossary of terms in the program. Here’s a sampling.

Blue bottles : police

boat or boat race: face

bundle: fight

china: friend

clobbering: fighting

clock: pointedly look at

double strong: keenly

flute: suit

G.B.H.: grievous bodily harm

hickory dickory: time

jellies: eyes

John Law: police

north and south: mouth

pan technicons: semi-trailers

articulated lorries: container trucks

pegs: legs

snout: cigarette

tearaways: mates that hang out

yobs: local tearaways