Gilgamesh

Sasha Selavie reviews Piers Beckley’s startling new play


Does most West End theatre bore the piss out of you? Join the club! Just mince down Shaftesbury Avenue, and there’s a puerile, poxy parade of plays niche-written for the lobotomized lemmings of the moronic, middlebrow, middle classes! See, words – especially when fully adulterated by strictly observed inoffensiveness – mean absolutely nothing, unless they’re fully, lethally metal-jacketed by fury, passion or fucking!

That, perhaps, is why the words of politicians are so deeply beneath contempt – they’re more empty of convictions than the most forgiving high court judge! Who, really, needs uncomfortable, no-interval tedium, with a stage choked to the rafters with wanked-out X-factor leftovers soiling an audiences’ suddenly short-changed dreams?

Not me, so thank Christ and his savagely stigmatized saints for director and actor Ray Shell’s blistering dramatization of writer Piers Beckley’s Gilgamesh. Shell is rightly acclaimed for his instantly addictive, nailing-eyes-to-the-page crackhead novel Iced, and here, he’s transliterated his talent to three bursting-at-the-guts dimensions!

So who – or what – is Gilgamesh? Briefly, it’s the oldest fiction known to humanity, easily predating the ancient Egyptians, the bloody template of Star Bores and every other hopelessly diluted conflict narrative ever since. Why is it still shockingly relevant? Because, inescapably, it’s the story of the hubristic humbling of the ultimate, male chauvinist prick, an antediluvian Harvey Weinstein whose raging psychopathy’s incapable of accepting any criticism! Unforgettably, Gilgamesh embodies the kind of foul, spunk-propelled egotism that’s socially poisoned gay and straight casting couches since time immemorial!

So, let’s set the scene. Welcome to Uruk, a barbaric city whose king – Luke Trebilcock’s rangily charismatic Gilgamesh – is the living law of instant life and death, endlessly entitled to cursory rape 24/7. Instantly, we’re immersed in a set of brilliantly sparse sepia backdrops, eerily reminiscent of a prehistoric spin on Edvard Munch’s iconic Scream painting, strikingly stalked by women worthy of Wonder Woman’s bloodthirsty Amazons. Like everything else here – set, acting and costumes – the language is as bluntly, pleasingly effective as a smack in a prissy, unsuspecting sycophant’s face. Tough, compressed and uncompromising, Piers Beckley’s script is pure bullet-points to Ray Shell’s machine-gun direction, a seamless montage of scenes bursting with self-contained power.

Still, screw abstraction – let’s cut to Gilgamesh’s raw, overwhelming physicality. What other show offers an instant, pheromonal high from simply inhaling the pungent sweat of wrestling male actors? This, my dears, is the ultimate source of Batman and Robin male bonding, the buddy scenario par excellence! See – not surprisingly – Uruk’s citizens have howlingly complained of Gilgamesh’s cursory abuses to the gods, and he’s subsequently physically challenged by Toby Wynne-Davies’ divinely-created Enkidu, all John Gielgud diction and Tyson Fury physique.  In the consensual fury of close, wrestling combat, Gilgamesh inadvertently discovers the additional delights of gay love, yet another string to his over-stocked assets!

More tightly bonded than monks glued to monastic choirboys, Gilgamesh and Enkidu search for the secret of immortality, but when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is forced to accept the inevitability of death. Of course, we all eventually have to – otherwise, the entire planet would be screaming with the certain knowledge of personal death daily! And it’s here where the fabulously redemptive power of Gilgamesh’s female cast works a witchy, irresistibly-educative magic. Learning by example, Gilgamesh exponentially evolves via contact with Sarah Lott’s lankily imperious huntress, and Nicola Blackman’s startlingly physical demon Humbaba, Margaret Tully’s glacial serenity and Jaye Ella-Ruth’s troubled conscience, iconically embodied as a whirlwind of rippling silk.

But still – most unexpectedly -it’s the inspired, wild-card casting of performance artist The Countess Alex Zapak that truly drop-kicks Gilgamesh into awesomely transgressive, unsuspected territory. Unconstrained by orthodox acting techniques, she’s a force of nature, an Iggy Pop – arguably the fiercest male rocker ever – with tits, the raging future of transmedia excellence. Boiling with curdled, penis-rotting and cunt-driven contempt, she’s ideally cast as the sacred harlot Shamhat, thrillingly shagging bestial Enkidu into ferociously orgasmic enlightenment! If Theresa May is one perfect, unpleasant metaphor for brain-dead, British theatre, Gilgamesh is the starving, desperate peasant who rips her knickers off! Enjoy!

Gilgamesh is at The White Bear Theatre until 21st October. 138 Kennington Park Road, SE11 4DJ. 7pm. Tickets £15 (£12 concessions).

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