Steven Berkoff's 'Kvetch' is a wilfully bleak look at the lives of five characters and their neuroses, performed and produced by a group of scientists from the Imperial College London Drama Society. With its reflections on Judaism, mortality, fear, dissatisfaction, sexuality and the tensions between id and ego overloaded with self-conscious dramatic devices (like freeze-frame inner monologues) and attempts at black humour, it feels like a cross between 'American Beauty' and a more serious Woody Allen film ('Interiors' or 'September', say).The problem is that the characters are, on the whole, too selfish and dour for the audience to want to care about them: the neurotic misanthrope Frank, his frustrated wife Donna, Frank's divorced work colleague Hal (probably the most likeable in the play), the flatulent mother-in-law and Frank's unctuous boss George (the most odious of the lot) have so little in the way of charm, intelligence or humour it becomes a very draining play to watch. I'm not convinced the actors improve it. Chris Wyatt as Frank, for instance, is a gauche whiner with an accent that keeps changing (English? American? Jewish?) and a very odd, strained delivery, which sounds like he is on the permanent brink of sexual climax. The Jewish idiom feels crowbarred in ('A golden observation will sound like dreck in the mouth of a schmuck') and the constant punctuation of scenes with moments of individual introspection becomes increasingly disruptive.I'm afraid I didn't enjoy this. The characters are shallow and solipsistic, the philosophical and theological conclusions put forward are trite, the gay twist comes out of nowhere and doesn't make sense, and to cap it all it just isn't funny. It is possible to refract existential considerations through the prism of one's Jewish roots whilst maintaining a healthy dose of humour (the Coen brothers demonstrated this in spades in 'A Serious Man'), but 'Kvetch', both the play itself and this production of it, falls short on a number of levels. Even compared to Boris Mitkov's 'For Your Entertainment', a coruscating drama student production at the Radisson and a much fairer comparison piece to this than the Coens, 'Kvetch' lacks lustre. However, the acting on the whole is far from disastrous (Wyatt is simply miscast, and the rest do well with limited means) and the direction is solid if uninspiring, so I wonder if the choice of play (still an admirably unusual one) is the problem here rather than ICL's handling of it. A depressing, unspectacular hour and a half.
