This is all class. Class war, that is. And a great night of theatre.
It’s fun, physical and bitingly satirical.
The performances by Katherine Shearer and Rowan McDonald are tremendous. They play two couples, one upper class and one lower. And these twin characterisations are superbly playful.
Steven Berkoff’s script, written in punchy verse, is naughty and rude, sharp and clever. It’s a glorious collection of both repartee and comic monologues, ranging over topics like sex, excess and casual violence.
Set in Thatcher’s England, it hasn’t lost its relevance. Only those whom it would serve to do so might think it had.
And that’s one of the joys of the piece, not just the mocking of the decadence of the privileged, but the skewering of what Marxist theorists call ideology.
Ideology refers to the views we hold that perpetuate our position in the economic hierarchy.
It’s a sobering concept. That our vision of the Truth is not honest, but either self serving or self sabotaging.
And it’s a concept that should drive us to ask ourselves a curly question:
What I call Truth, what does it Do?
Veronica Kaye
Decadence
TAP Gallery until Sun 15 Sept
Theatre Red 
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