Bouncers

Staged with extreme simplicity, the play takes place in a provincial discotheque—the Saturday night haunt of England's disaffected youth. Using the device of four tuxedoed male bouncers (who also "become" a variety of other characters) the action of the play moves from a group of predatory working-class youths, charmless and barely of drinking age, who spend their week's pocket money on cheap beer and greasy "fast food"; to their giggling female counterparts, who end up drunk and disheveled in their desperate search for a good time; and on to boisterous encounters in the men's room, and even an hilarious segment involving an imagined scene from a "blue" video. Performing at a nonstop pace, the four actors move from one irreverent bit of action—and impersonation—to another with virtuosic ease and, in the end, conjure up a telling portrait of a generation doomed to a humdrum present and a diminished future, whose "moral decay" is, perhaps, the inevitable by-product of a society that has moved from the glory days of a powerful empire to a foundering socialist state no longer able to fully accommodate the aspirations of its people.