Steven Berkoff's work has become such a staple of student and Edinburgh Fringe groups that you are inclined to assume you've seen it all before. But in fact this modern reworking of the Oedipus myth has seldom been seen in London in recent years.
Martin Webb's production may be patchy in places, but both it and the play are so fresh and alive they provide a forceful reminder of why paying money to sit in the dark can give you a real thrill. Berkoff transposes the story from Thebes to London's East End, where young Eddy, plucked from the river after the Southend-bound paddle steamer hits a mine, grows up unaware that his parents are not his natural kin.
When a fairground Gypsy tells them that Eddy will kill his father and bed his mother, they can't get the young man out of the house fast enough. But within hours Eddy has killed the owner of a greasy-spoon cafe and settled down with the dead man's wife, who many years previously lost her son in an accident.
Where Sophocles is spare, Berkoff is showy. The language is foul, bloated, swag-bellied, tumescent. It is like an extended orgasm. Though there are times - particularly as the story thunders towards its climax - when you think "Oh just get on with it", the effect is both exhausting and enormously satisfying. In part it is because Berkoff's descriptive powers are so strong.
In a few phrases he summons up Eddy's adoptive home: the smell of lard, the picture on the mantelpiece of granny "looking like Mussolini in drag", Eddy's sister in her room "meditating over some juicy blackhead". But it is also because the munificence of the language demands a suitably ornamental response from the actors. It is like watching skaters attempting a fiendishly difficult jump on very thin ice.
Oliver Lansley is near perfect as the hapless Eddy, only flagging slightly towards the close. But the distinctiveness of Berkoff's language and the expressionistic physical style of the piece are so familiar that they can pose other difficulties. There are occasions, particularly with the writing is at its most florid, when Berkoff seems almost to be parodying himself. I was struck, as by other Berkoff revivals, that I am seeing a very clever copy rather than an original masterpiece. But it is a bracing evening, and anyone unfamiliar with Berkoff's scurrilous, sulphurous and gloriously theatrical play should head west.
• Until January 27. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
