Reviewing Berkoff is challenging. Words cascade towards you, the scenarios are raw and potent and the crisp, sinister and subtle characterisations he creates threaten to gang up and kick everything else into the shadows.

However, Snowdrop Productions’ creative and pacy portrayal of this motley, "blended" family clumped tenuously together by bigoted bully "Dad" takes this seminal play a step further.

The stage is bare, save a few spindly chairs, the backdrop stark and dark, the props scant. This is theatre at its back-room finest, with the actors playing siblings, lovers, fighters, friends and, even, machinery – as in the Harley Davidson scene, when Mike straddles Les to "tear up" the East End. Other fine moments arrive during the supper scenes when slabs of bread and gravy were used both as weapons and as a way of avoiding communication.

Karl Kennedy-Williams’ muscular, viscerally perfect Mike is a compelling cocktail of frustration and joy who bestrides his "manor" like a Colussus and descended on girlfriend Sylv like a “moon probe.”

Matthew Devitt is brutal and bombastic as Dad - reminiscing over the days before cinemas became Bingo halls, expostulating his traditional views, and putting them into practice in the bedroom with long-suffering, housecoat-clad Mum, played with subtlety and pathos by Lloyd Ryan-Thomas. “Belch, fart – the music of the spheres,” she giggles at the end of a quietly moving monologue about her "high-classed" dreams, and the clear and present dangers of sharing a bed with monstrous Dad.

This production, and its performers, are beyond reproach. However, the choice of venue was slightly off, as East is best viewed up close and personal in a pub theatre, and did not sit comfortably among the plush seats and high ceilings of the Theatre Royal.