THE ODDS might seem to be fairly formidably stacked against the possibility of mirth in a play with a post-apocalyptic setting where the survivors are a blind wheelchair-bound tyrant, a lame servant and two aged parents, stashed in dustbins, who are literally, as opposed to alcoholically, legless. Their accounts of their adventures and conquests are set against a claustrophobic working-class world, with Mum and Dad sucked into blinkered fantasies.The play famously mixes elements of Greek drama, Shakespeare and classical music references with East End gobbiness – you can almost see Berkoff gleefully bashing the heads of high and low culture together. Soon Matthew Cullum and Christopher Middleton are making you laugh with the kind of facial expressions and movements that leave cartoonists no room for improvisation, while Mum, Dad, and Sylv provide a chorus of ruefully animated apathy.
The plot is simple – Les and Mike have both slept with the same “bird” (Sylv) and, after shedding each other’s blood copiously, have bonded in shag-obsessed brotherhood. From the moment when a beam lights up the stereotypical, old-fashioned working class silhouettes – Mum’s curlers trapped in a headscarf, Sylv’s sprightly peroxide pony- tail, Les and Mike’s jaws stuck out firm with blind defiance – it is clear that the audience is going to have the humour thrust down its throat Berkoff- style. Almost 25 years on, he has proved as a director that the play can still burn with its original furious comic energy.

Steven Berkoff’s East was first performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1975. The boys are revving up for their next shag, while Mum (cursed with the charisma of a dishmop) is dusting haplessly, absorbed in her own grey dreams. DAD’S CHIP-filled belly is so vast it dominates the family dinner- table. He smashes his invective home with an HP sauce bottle, invoking Oswald Mosley with passion as he revels in a sinisterly homely anti-Semitism Around him, the family has stopped listening.

“Along with Will Alsop at North Greenwich, we were the lucky ones because we had no historic buildings above us, or anything too close to the footprint,” he said.This freedom has allowed the creation of two masterpieces along the scenic route of stations that is the Jubilee Line Extension.. Peak-time traffic will initially be 40,000, but Canary Wharf station is built to take 100,000 – traffic will increase, especially once the tower blocks at Heron Quay are completed.David Nelson, one of the partners and the architect who Roland Paoletti said he enjoyed working with the most, admits that they had a brilliant site. “This station is bold, it’s magnificent,” says Roland Paoletti, the man who commissioned it. “If Canada Water [which opened three weeks ago] is like the Fiat Punto – a remarkable, serviceable, stylish little car – this station by Norman is the Ferrari.”Norman Foster, who greatly admires Brunel, proves how close he is to the nuts and bolts of structures and how seamlessly he can hide such things as sprinklers, hoses and hydrants or tone them down without camouflage.All cabling is housed under the platforms or behind walls, accessible via maintenance gangways so that the entire station can be serviced behind scenes. Robust engineering informs the design, but the lyricism of the form transcends it. At platform level, the concrete diaphragm wall cast into the ground is left exposed.