Steven Berkoff

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	Photo: © Steven Berkoff

Biography

Writer, theatre director and actor Steven Berkoff was born in 1937 in Stepney, East London. Educated at the Raines Foundation Grammar School, he trained to be an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy in London, and later in Paris.

In 1968, after working in repertory theatre, he founded the London Theatre Group, working with a group of actors to perform an adaptation of Franz Kafka's story In The Penal Colony. Berkoff has adapted a number of other classic works for the stage, including Kafka's Metamorphosis and The Trial, Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Strindberg's Miss Julie. He is also the author of many original plays, including East, first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975 (revived at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, in 1999), Decadence (1982), Greek (1982) and West (1985).

He is also the author of several works of non-fiction, including a volume of autobiography, Free Association (1996), and a book of short stories, Graft: Tales of an Actor (1998). He also wrote the text for a book of photographs, The Theatre of Steven Berkoff (1992). He has worked extensively as an actor and director. His film appearances include A Clockwork Orange, McVicar, Beverley Hills Cop, Octopussy, The Krays and Rancid Aluminium.

His play, The Secret Love Life of Ophelia, had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2001. Since then he has written Requiem for Ground Zero (2002), a tribute in verse, and Tough Acts (2003), reflections on people he has worked with on stage and in film.

Steven Berkoff lives in East London. His latest play is Sit and Shiver, which premiered in London in 2006. He has  written two recent books of non-fiction, My Life in Food (2007) and Richard II in New York (2008), which gives an insight into his directing of Shakespeare in the US.

His latest book is You Remind Me of Marilyn Monroe (2009), a collection of poetry.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Drama, Non-fiction, Short stories

Bibliography

East/Agamemnon/The Fall of the House of Usher   Calder, 1977

Gross Intrusion and Other Stories   Calder, 1979

The Trial and Metamorphosis: Two Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka   Amber Lane, 1981

Decadence/Greek   Calder, 1982

West/Lunch/Harry's Christmas   Faber and Faber, 1985

Kvetch/Acapulco   Faber and Faber, 1986

Sink the Belgrano/Massage   Faber and Faber, 1987

Steven Berkoff's America   (illustrated by Graham Dean)   Hutchinson, 1988

The Trial/Metamorphosis/In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka   Amber Lane, 1988

A Prisoner in Rio   Hutchinson, 1989

I Am Hamlet   Faber and Faber, 1989

Coriolanus in Deutschland   Amber Lane, 1992

The Theatre of Steven Berkoff   (text by Steven Berkoff, photographs by Roger Morton)   Methuen, 1992

Overview   Faber and Faber, 1994

Meditations on Metamorphosis   Faber and Faber, 1995

Free Association: an Autobiography   Faber and Faber, 1996

Plays 1   (Contents: East; West; Greek; Sink the Belgrano; Massage; Lunch)   Faber and Faber, 1996

Plays 2   (Contents: Decadence; Kvetch; Acapulco; Harry's Christmas; Brighton Beach Scumbags; Darling You Were Marvellous; Pitbull; Actor)   Faber and Faber, 1996

Graft: Tales of an Actor   Oberon, 1998

Plays 3   (Contents: Ritual in Blood; Messiah; Oedipus)   Faber and Faber, 2000

Shopping in the Santa Monica Mall   Robson, 2000

The Secret Love Life of Ophelia   Faber and Faber, 2001

Requiem for Ground Zero   Amber Lane Press, 2002

Tough Acts   Robson Books, 2003

Sit and Shiver   Faber and Faber, 2006

My Life in Food   ACDC Publishing, 2007

Richard II in New York   arima publishing, 2008

You Remind Me of Marilyn Monroe   Herla, 2009

Read about books by Steven Berkoff at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Steven Berkoff at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1991   Edinburgh Festival Fringe First   Kvetch

1991   Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy of the Year   Kvetch

1991   Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play   (shortlist)   The Trial

1999   Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play   (shortlist)   One Man

2000   Edinburgh Festival Fringe First   Messiah

2000   Glasgow Herald Golden Angel Award   Messiah

2001   Glasgow Herald Golden Angel Award   The Secret Love Life of Ophelia

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Critical Perspective

‘Isn’t that why people go to the theatre? To see passions safely liberated which in life must be choked up and released only on golf courses?’ Steven Berkoff remarks, in a typically provocative aside, in I Am Hamlet (1989). The liberation of energy and idiosyncratic psychological insights are indeed his hallmarks as a writer-director, whether performing on the stage or on the page. Berkoff’s career in the theatre, television, and Hollywood movies (almost invariably cast as a sadistic villain) has tended to overshadow his achievements as a prolific writer. Anyone who has seen his innovative adaptations during the 1970s, Kafka’s The Trial and Metamorphosis (1981) and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1977), or much more recently his one-man show Shakespeare’s Villains, is not likely to forget his dynamic stage presence. But what all his projects and writing in various genres have in common is the intensely personal dimension that he brings to them. Readers seeking a detailed account of Berkoff’s origins, his struggles to establish himself as an actor (his own particular metamorphosis), and then to develop his style of ‘physical’ acting by founding the experimental London Theatre Group, should seek out the highly entertaining Free Association: an Autobiography (1996), Graft: Tales of an Actor (1998), and The Theatre of Steven Berkoff (1992).

Berkoff’s writing is very various, and far more than the offshoot of an actor-director’s creative wool gathering. Among his lesser-known works are the ‘little allegorical tales’ of Gross Intrusion (1979), and controversial responses to recent events in Sink the Belgrano (1986) and his poem Requiem for Ground Zero (2002). But his most exciting writing has been for the stage. As he says, ‘like Shakespeare, I did it to fuel my company and create my stock’. He began with those adaptations of Kafka and Poe, and then began to write plays with ‘non-representational images of human behaviour’, which he has described as being ‘the living embodiments of my life’. Thus he has drawn considerably upon his East End upbringing and Jewish family background, firstly in East (1977), with its threatening violence and expressionism, incorporating Cockney rhyming slang, and then its sequel West (1985). Jewish humour informs Kvetch (1986), and his most recent play, Sit and Shiver, premiered in Los Angeles during 2004. Berkoff has also used the forms of Greek tragedy to great effect in Agamemnon (1977), and Greek (1982), the latter an updating of the Oedipus myths. His other mode is savage social and political satire. This is given full rein in Decadence (1982), which he described as being written out of ‘a desire to let loose the fantasies that inspired unbridled indulgence’, in a series of outrageous sketches about greed and jealousy.

Berkoff essentially mulls over his experiences of productions and insights into acting, adaptation and directing, in production diaries or ‘close reading’ studies such as I Am Hamlet (1989) (‘when you play Hamlet he becomes you … you feel like a prize fighter in a fairground, taking on all comers. Each scene is a new opponent’), Coriolanus in Deutschland (1992) and Meditations on Metamorphosis (1995). His journalistic articles and essays, often written on location during the making of movies, are collected in Overview (1994) and Shopping in the Santa Monica Mall (2000): they are casually anecdotal and reflect his greatly increased profile as an actor-director in recent years. While some of the material in Overview found its way into Steven Berkoff’s America and into his autobiography, other pieces are equally well worth reading for their pungent observations on politics, food and the state of the theatre. ‘Going to the Movies in Hollywood … 1990’ takes a wonderfully sardonic view, both of his late friend, the actress Georgia Brown, and the awfulness of some Hollywood products. By contrast, he becomes a gourmet diner in ‘Concorde … 1989’ reporting on the experience of supersonic flight: ‘I decided to treat myself … [to] a mesmeric assault on the senses’.
 
As a writer, Berkoff’s breakthrough was East, premiered at the 1975 Edinburgh Festival. Fast, highly sexualized observations are exchanged by local toughs Les and Mike (‘we sworn mates were once the deadly poison of each other’s eye’), ‘darling Sylv (of legendary knockers)’, and the hapless, television-obsessed Mum and Dad. Violence is converted into language, just as the actors are turned into tableaux and objects - as when Les becomes a motorbike and Mike rides him: ‘I streak past those ponces and hairdressers in Minis, Sprites, MGs, menswear salesmen in green Cortinas, or ancient Cadillacs driven by aging movie stars cruising for rough trade …’ As these 1950s-1960s references may suggest, the play is actually a kind of elegy for an already vanishing place and era, ‘a veritable tour of our golden city’. Near the end, Mike and Les ask ‘Where’s Big Harry gone? And Curly King?/ Where’s hard Arthur? Where’s all the hard men?’

Kvetch is ‘an American play about anxiety’, a painfully comical look at the hypocrisies and desires that lurk behind salesman Frank and his wife Donna’s failing marriage. Frank’s mother-in-law, and his friend Hal, join them round their miserable dinner table. The comedy comes from the official dialogue being interspersed with ‘asides’ to the audience, saying what they really think and feel. The characters can get rid of their ‘kvetch’ by following their own desires – only after a hilarious moment when Hal suddenly appears from beneath the sheets while the couple are having sex: ‘But I am your fantasy … Relax, don’t fight it’. In a different satirical vein, Acapulco (1986) is set around the bar of a hotel bar in Mexico during the making of a sequel to Rambo. The cynicism and self-interest of actors is counter-pointed by some wider social and political observations, and the awful local poverty, as witnessed by taciturn British actor Steve. He is drawn into arguing with a garrulous New Yorker who, as the bar closes, says he intends to persuade Roman Polanski to cast him in his new film: ‘I’d make a good pirate’.

Indeed Polanski, and Sylvester Stallone, are among the essay portraits in Berkoff’s most recent book, Tough Acts (2003). He begins this series of analytical reminiscences in 1961 with Stella Adler (‘the lines were still falling about Stella’s feet like Autumn leaves’), and moves through the years, alive to the differing acting qualities of Christopher Plummer, Christopher Walken, Brad Davis and Eddie Murphy. The eccentric perfectionism of Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski is glimpsed; there is a rueful account of his edgy acquaintance with Al Pacino and his contribution to ‘Shakespeare’s Villains’. Perhaps the most purely enjoyable essay depicts Joan Collins during his filming of Decadence: ‘audacious and demanding, yet still with a thin shell of vulnerability’. Berkoff is himself a ‘tough act’ to sum up, protean as his talents are: but all his writings testify to his grand passion for the theatre.

Dr Jules Smith, 2005

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square London  WC1N 3AU Tel: +44 (0) 20 7465 0045 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7465 0034 E-mail: gapublicity@faber.co.uk http://www.faber.co.uk

Agent Rosica Colin Ltd 1 Clareville Grove Mews London  SW7 5AH England Tel: +44 (0)20 7370 1080 Fax: +44 (0)20 7244 6441

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Related links

http:/ / www.amberlanepress.co.uk

http:/ / www.stevenberkoff.com

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