Berkoff's Women La Cremeria Theatre Fringe Club January 15 You can't beat sex. As a subject, it's the ultimate hook for readers, isn't it? Or an audience. In Linda Marlowe's one-woman show you never really knew how outrageous the references were going to get. And they were fairly outrageous from the start, spiced up by a great many four-letter verbs, spoken with style.
Marlowe played eight characters in 50 minutes - all abridged versions from Steven Berkoff's stories. There were no costume changes and only a minimalist set on which she was Clytemnestra in her palace in ancient Greece stabbing her husband, Agamemnon, and only revealing the reason as he dies .
She was a working-class drudge; a lonely spinster overdosing on gin and casual sex, her only comfort the Mecca dance hall from which she is eventually banned; an aristocrat enjoying droit de seigneur with a hotel valet, or trotting, cantering, galloping on an imaginary steed in bloody pursuit of a fox.
Marlowe is a woman who, at 50-something, oozes girl power with her tough act, her carmine lips and throaty laughter and her cabaret style.
She has all of Berkoff's ability to come across as the pleasure-seeker, desensitised, wonderfully disgusting.
She is empowering, verbal, intense, woman unleashed.
