They stand there, legs astride, each one a testosterone titan who looks as if he's capable of selling his soul for a decent pint and has all his best orgasms during the Match of the Day highlights.
John Godber's Bouncers has been so frequently performed since its appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1982 that director Dominic Dromgoole recently wrote that it was impossible to gather 10 male actors without discovering at least a couple who have performed in this play; where men are men, and women are giggling accessories to handbags.
Godber's recent production of Thick as a Brick at the Greenwich Theatre, which dealt with a problem school in which teach-ers were more likely to suffer heart attacks than receive bonuses, demonstrated how his commendably ponce-free theatre can degrade into a bad case of over-simplified finger-wagging. The more playful Bouncers, however, is carried along by a rhythm and easy comedy which, at its best, evokes Berkoff, without the manic glint in the eye, as it trawls the macho fart-and-shag world of four men who work on the doors of a Northern nightclub.
Appropriately for the world of the nightclub, the stage presents itself simply as an all-black interior, where the atmosphere can go from self-pityingly morose to ecstatic with the help of a few flashing coloured lights. Godber himself is one of the four actors who transforms himself from Northern lad to Northern lass (in his case, "plain Elaine, sweating like a racehorse"), as they depict a clubbers' arena where dolly-bird naiveté and aggressive alcohol consumption dance hand in hand.
Godber balances his punchy comedy with a pathos, so that one moment you're laughing at Sexy Suzie (played with wonderful flirtatious va-va-vroom by Andrew Dennis), and the next you're thoughtful, as Lucky Eric (Andrew Dunn) depicts her eating cold pizza unemotionally while she is shagged against a wall.
Although both sexes are ridiculed in this play it is painfully obvious, watching it as a woman, that feminism still has a lot to do for these girls who act as if their hemlines are far higher than their IQs and who risk becoming teenage mothers in return for a Babycham and a quick fumble.
Visually, the production reaches its acme when Dennis and Dunn hilariously mime a porn film which might be subtitled Post-man's Knock, while the zealously updated soundtrack provides a finger-tapping energy. This play may have been around for a while, but there's life in the old Godber yet.
Bouncers
