Maison Bertaux in Greek Street is a long-established patisserie in a seedy-ish bit of Soho. An unprepossessing shopfront admits you to a cramped room filled with four small tables where you can consume good coffee and the best French cakes in London…
If you go there on a Sunday morning you will most likely be served by Metin – a friendly articulate guy perhaps early 50s. But on Thursday night Maison Bertaux was transformed into the Maison Bertaux Theatre Club, and Metin is the writer, director and lead actor of “You You”.
Elephant. A pachyderm with a prehensile proboscis
We are greeted by Johann – another sometime worker in the shop – who pours us a glass of wine and leaves us (the 7 people that are the audience) to sit and chat, eyes wandering over the Victorian shopfittings and Lincrusta-covered walls.
A little after 9:00 Johann picks up his piano-accordion and announces that he will play us in to the strains of the “You-You waltz” – so we troop upstairs and settle in the 15′ x 15′ upstairs room, lit only by four desk lamps with red bulbs.
Three actors (Metin Marlow, Tania Wade, Guy Manning), dressed in black file in and proceed to entrance us for the next 45 minutes. No props. No scenery. Just inter-action and swirling, trance-making dialogue.
..The lunatic, the sane
The brain, the brain
The brain can’t explain…
What’s it about?
About a man trying to buy a greyhound in a public toilet.
About a friend who “will die for him”.
About lust so strong that both man and woman are reduced to half-sentences.
About loneliness.
About regret for missed opportunities, passion unexpressed.
About life lived to the core – but also a sense that even in the deepest of relationships our lives merely touch tangentially before continuing their own trajectories…
But you could see other things there – that’s the power…
I remember remembering you since I first remember.
