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BITE 2008 and It Goes Beyond Theatre present Berkoff's the hard-hitting urban drama

Sydney's Seymour Centre and Melbourne Company It Goes Beyond Theatre will present Steven Berkoff’s first stageplay East as the final instalment in the 2008 BITE season in the Downstairs Theatre from 28 October to 22 November. 

Set in London's East End in the late 1960s (the London of Berkoff's own childhood), his play takes key scenes from the lives and relationships of five family members told with a mixture of intense physicality, cockney slang and Shakespearean rhythms, creating highly stylised dialogue that is dark, bold, ugly and razor sharp.

As he says: "There is no holding back or reserve in the East End of youth as I remember … you lived for the moment and vitally held it … you said what you thought and did what you felt. If something bothered you, you let it out as strongly as you could, as if the outburst could curse and therefore purge whatever it was that caused it.”

Through a collage of virtuosic monologues and physical performances, East explores the waste of youth, the damage and desire of adolescence, the tragedy of opportunities lost and the wonderful moments of breaking free.

It is an exuberant aria of damage and desire. Berkoff also explores how the explosive youthful anarchy of the adolescents contrasts so sharply with their parents’ vapid lives — their mother numbed into submission, their father’s poisonous nostalgia for when “things were good”.

Members of It Goes Beyond Theatre are all graduates of VCA and are the first group of the institute’s students to form their own independent theatre company with their sights firmly set on bringing daring, explosive and provocative works to the popular stage.