THERE used to be a joke a bout a well known and very vain Irish actor. His vocal warm up before he went on stage, it was said, used to go "Me-me-me-me- I-I-I-I-Ego- Ego-Ego-Ego." The man was no shrinking violet, certainly, but I couldn't help thinking that his self esteem was that of a rather diffident mouse compared to Steven Berkoffs, which goes rampaging like a bull elephant through the pages of this autobiography. Allied to this is a deep streak of paranoia as our hero is consistently misunderstood, cheated of his due worth and, worst of all, ignored. But fear not, the future will put things right and a hundred years from now his plays will still be performed while other, more highly regarded writers of our time are relegated to dusty libraries. It must be so, for he says so himself.
Yet, despite all the self aggrandisement, it's impossible not to admire Berkoff's talent. Not only have his plays a raw energy and fierce honesty, but they and he are a constant and necessary thorn in the side of those who hold the real power in British theatre, what has been dubbed "the theatrical royal family", nearly all Oxford or Cambridge educated, attached to either the two great national companies or the London West End, and involved, for the most part, in well bred, conservative productions of "classic" plays.
Berkoff goes for the crude. His dialogue tends to be scatological, though often written in rough verse, and his characters are malevolent and thuggish, whether they come from the upper or lower reaches of society. He always seems to be on the outside looking in, and the plays are intensely vigorous and imbued with a desperate humour and a violent physicality that is very much of today. No wonder he is something of a hero to young actors, whom he also provides with long, attention grabbing shock horror speeches much in use at auditions.
As a director, Berkoff honed his physical skills at the school of the French mime Jacques Lecoq, combining them with either his own texts or with adaptations, several of his great hero, Kafka. Forced to found his own companies, he made actors use their bodies as well as their voices, and in this has probably made his biggest contribution to the modern theatre.
At his best, as in the slow motion version of Wilde's Salome, which he premiered at the Gate in Dublin some years ago, he has managed to breathe life into material which in other hands Would probably prove unstageable. (Most of his account of that production is taken up with justifying why he did not let the Gate go to London with it, having already decided he would play the role of Herod himself, which he did at the National Theatre, and with excoriating Time Out magazine "a platform for poking twerps" for suggesting he had somehow used a company to try out a play and then absconded with it.)
The book is full of good insights, though its method can be as irritating as its author. Berkoff scorns a linear structure and gives us a series of vignettes that jump back and forth arbitrarily from his childhood to today and to episodes in between. One no sooner gets an interesting bit about, say, life in the East End of London where he grew up in straitened circumstances, than one is whisked off to his less than riveting time as a repertory actor, or a dig at something like Miss Saigon, "which sits like a great soggy pudding" in Drury Lane (hear, hear!).
Perhaps the only person he writes about with real affection his mother, a doughty Jewish lady who at one stage emigrated with her children to New York, but had to come back when Berkoff's father, a tailor, wouldn't join them there. A series of female "partners" flit through his pages, but neither their comings nor their goings merit more than the most passing mentions.
With all that menace, Berkoff is a natural to play Hollywood villains a type of role where being English also seems to help and so it has come to pass, presumably very lucratively. What with that, his invitation to the National and the many productions of his plays all over the world (often starring famous names like Baryshnikov and Polanski) one can't help feeling he is no longer quite the eternal outsider he himself thinks he is. Indeed, for all the black leather, the glaring and the verbal punch ups, one ends up with the distinct impression that Berkoff's bark is worse than his bite.
