The Devil's Advocate

10 April 2012

A grey and hostile Thames lashes against the exterior wall of Steven Berkoff ’s Limehouse office. Inside, the man who, at 66, remains one of theatre’s most controversial practitioners is on fine, provocative form.

No stranger to the killer quote, he regularly appears on the letters pages of newspapers, and on at least one occasion has issued a death threat to a critic.


Now, after a long stage career and playing villains in such films as Beverly Hills Cop and Octopussy, he is taking the logical step of playing the Devil in the Old Vic’s current revival of his own production of Messiah: Scenes from a Crucifixion.

“It felt natural to me to play Satan,” he declares proudly. Like many of Berkoff ’s more colourful statements, this assertion deserves closer examination. Rather than seeing Satan as a caricature of evil, he — tellingly — reveals that it is Satan as a tempter and a wrongly maligned outsider that intrigues him. “I felt a kind of kindred spirit to it and I thought, why deny myself this opportunity?”

He is even more controversial when discussing Jesus, whom he sees as “the precursor to a long line of Jewish magicians leading up to Houdini and David Blaine”. David Blaine and Jesus? A Plexiglas box suspended above the Thames and a crucifix? “The ultimate thing to prove to the Jews was that you could rise from the dead. That was the ultimate trick.”

The Jewish-born Berkoff is no cynic. Yet he treats debate as a form of intellectual flame-throwing and has patently devoted a huge amount of research to developing a piece of drama with the superficially modern twist that Jesus was not the Son of God, but a charismatic opportunist with a spin doctor’s ability to manipulate the Bible for his own ends.

Three years ago at the Edinburgh Festival, where Messiah, written and directed by Berkoff, was first performed, it provoked the usual mixed and visceral reactions, but led one reviewer to exclaim: “It is beautiful and it is blasphemous ... It encompasses both the art of spin-doctoring and also our fragile, human need and ability to make huge leaps of faith.”

Although he is now eligible for a free bus pass, in the flesh Berkoff remains an imposing presence. His beak of a nose, hooded, predatory eyes and watchful alertness evoke a bird of prey poised to strike energetically at anything that intrigues or annoys him — theatre critics, for example.

“I respect critics,” he begins, but is soon attacking the kind of review that is “filtered through prejudice, anger, self-loathing, ignorance, total lack of
education, a lack of understanding of methodology ... Very often it does annoy me because the message is corrupt.

"I’m not talking about getting a bad review. If I’ve had a bad review I’ll normally take it on the chin, even though I think they’re wrong. But I don’t think anything I’ve ever done is bad — I’ve established a style, and that is what I do.”

Now Berkoff laughs off the death threat he made two decades ago to the Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, following an unfavourable review, and on this occasion reserves most of his anger for John Peter of the Sunday Times, whom he denounces for failing to understand the intense physical nature of his work and accuses of contributing “to the death of theatre”.

It is somewhat puzzling, therefore, to conduct a cursory-web-search and find at least two highly complimentary reviews by Peter of Berkoff ’s recent productions.


Berkoff ’s wounded anger stems, he explains, from one review of his version of Kafka’s The Trial at the National Theatre, and from a muted reaction to his Messiah when he first unveiled it at Edinburgh.

It is impossible to agree with Berkoff ’s cataclysmic declaration that the highly respected Peter has killed theatre, but as always there is a more interesting theme beneath the rhetorical fireworks — that neither critics nor the theatre Establishment adequately acknowledge the experimental physical work that is one of his trademarks.

In life as in his art, Berkoff has frequently found himself in the eye of the storm, not least after a failed attempt to bring a civil action against him for rape in 2001, and a minor drama in 2002 when he was denied entry to America for allegedly violating the terms of a work visa.

Evy Warshawski, director of the Ann Arbor Festival — where Berkoff was to perform Shakespeare’s Villains — said that he “kept telling immigration officials ‘I’m not a terrorist, I’m an actor!’”

Both admirers and detractors might argue that the distinction between the two is not as pronounced in Berkoff ’s case as it might be in that of other actors.
Certainly, in his recently published Tough Acts — a series of essays about working with such greats as Stanley Kubrick, Al Pacino and Christopher Plummer — the potential for destruction occurs on more than one occasion in his descriptions of those he admires.

The actress Stella Adler is portrayed as “a Phaedra spewing forth fire; a lava flow, tongue lashing the words like rafts on angry seas”, while Leonard Rossiter is seen, ironically, as a bird of prey “ready to flap casually over to his prey and, just as casually, eviscerate it”.

The theatre world would undoubtedly be duller without Berkoff, a man whose sense of the epic and monumental is apparent even in his vast base at Limehouse, where the walls are dominated by huge blown-up photographs he has taken in the East End (where he grew up) and paintings that depict individuals engaged in constant muscular struggle.

Before I leave, I ask about his claim that he could run the National Theatre from his bed, prompting another tirade against the theatrical Establishment.

Acknowledging that Nicholas Hytner has achieved much by bringing in audiences, he protests nonetheless that the same “boring, dreary directors” seem to be given all the opportunities, when he could bring in more vibrant outsiders such as Julie Taymor or foreign directors like Peter Stein by making a few phone calls. “It’s easy — I wouldn’t have to get out of bed.”

One can almost hear the guffawing from the South Bank, upstream. But Berkoff is passionately defiant. It will be a while before his epitaph is written, but it is easy to imagine what it might be: anything but indifference.

Tough Acts is published by Robson Books. Messiah: Scenes from a Crucifixion is at the Old Vic until 3 January.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in