LUNCH
Berkoff’s Lunch–first produced in London in 1981, a year after West–is also poetic, though this time Berkoff draws on T.S. Eliot, not Shakespeare. Like Eliot, Berkoff is fascinated by the spiritual and sexual sterility of modern life. And like Eliot, Berkoff is determined to reveal the latent poetry in contemporary speech. In fact, much of his dialogue sounds like Eliot, as when a character remarks, “The wind blows like spiderwebs across our face.” Berkoff even quotes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
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These are not necessarily fatal flaws. Rohm and Torbica make an extraordinarily likable couple, and they deliver Berkoff’s poetry with understated ease. It’s just that in transforming Lunch into an entertaining, purely comic one-act, they (and director Kenny Mitten) lose touch with what Berkoff describes as “the primeval forces” that twist and turn through the subterranean layers of his play.
