Everything in Steven Berkoff’s office by the Thames is on a giant scale. Giant table, giant settee, giant Anglepoise lamp, giant black and whites of the old East End, giant Peter Howson pictures of giant men bulging with giant muscles along one wall. I’d always imagined that Berkoff too, up close, with that cropped head and that bull neck, would be something of a giant too. But he’s not — he’s an average-sized man, with an average amount of physical charisma and, I have always thought, an average amount of writing talent, most of which was used up on his first play,
East, in 1975.
Undoubtedly, however, Berkoff does have an ego to match the size of his fixtures and fittings. “I have this responsibility to the British public,” he tells me at one point. He then adds, instantly trading up from the national to the global stage, “I’ve got this duty to give pleasure to the world, and it’s your privilege and your duty and your fate that you put something on and people say, Great.” Yet it doesn’t seem to make him very happy, this dutifulness. He has one of those characters, common among artists, that whatever success and recognition he achieves, and he hasn’t done badly given his ability, it is never going to be as much as what he needs and wants and thinks he is worth. Many people grow up believing they’re not special at all. Some grow up believing they are a great deal more special than they actually are.
That said, give credit to Berkoff as a good old-fashioned hustler. He’s a showman, he works hard, he’s prolific, he gets things on. Critics have the right to wish that at 66, Berkoff would shut up. He of course has the right to disobey them. I read his long poem about September 11, for instance, Requiem for Ground Zero. I thought it was dreadful. (Berkoff must be the only person in Britain who thinks calling an aeroplane “a great big silver bird” is some kind of fresh image.) But I admired the energy of the man in putting it out, in spite of myself.
His latest dramatic offering is The Messiah, which opened this week at the Old Vic. I’ve read this play, written four years ago, twice now and I can’t see what it amounts to. There’s a lot of swearing and Berkoff’s trademark blood’n’sex-soaked monologues, plus a hint of that old chestnut about Jesus being a socialist agitator. The script is adolescent stuff, fully justifying the critic who told me: “Berkoff is liked by people who don ’t know much about theatre. The man is a total ham.” Some sections (Soldier 6: “They’ll pay a few bob won’t they . . . I mean for his clobber”; Soldier 3: “Course! Like they’re mementoes yeah”) are so bad they remind me of a blasphemous essay I wrote when I was 13 in a (successful) bid to wind up my RE teacher.
I put it to Berkoff that far from being cold-shouldered by the arts establishment, he’s actually been given a fair few chances over the years: he has directed several plays at the National for instance, though not for a long time, and now he’s at the Old Vic. “I’m not ‘at’ the Old Vic,” he says, “I had to rent it, a high rent. If I get plays on it’s because I have to finance them very often. Nobody gives you anything. I’m not part of that network of mates who say (he adopts a whiney posh voice) ‘Oh, what would you like to come and do for us next year Steve?’” Berkoff warms to his theme. “When I hear people say: ‘Oh, Trevor or so-and-so, y’know the other guy . . .’” Richard Eyre, I suggest? He continues: “‘Or so-and-so said would you like to do? And I really didn’t know, so I thought maybe I’ll do this’, I think it ’s a little network of people of similar interests and tastes.”
Berkoff says he has deliberately preserved his “outsider” status because it guards against complacency, “keeps your conscience and antenna on full alert” and “relieves you of the necessity of pandering to people you don’t have anything in common with”. I’m more inclined to think that professional outsiders are people who have failed to become insiders, often because they can’t get along with others unless they are in complete control, and that Berkoff is making the best of an undesired situation.
He talks of award ceremonies as “tossers with their teeth hanging out being given an award by another tosser”, but I very much doubt he would refuse a prize if one came his way. Certainly neither his autobiography nor his new book, Tough Acts, chock full of luvvie anecdotes based on his (often rather fleeting) encounters with some of the greats of the acting profession, gives the impression of a man content to be where he has usually found himself, on the periphery.
Berkoff is supposedly a prickly interviewee. He once threatened to kill a critic, and he’s got that scary chiaroscuro stare employed to good effect as various Hollywood baddies down the years (though he now admits his film career has “gone very quiet. If you neglect it they forget about you”). I think that’s mostly for show, that aggression. He was rather guarded (justifiably, as it turned out, given the tenor of this article) during our hour together, no more than that. Down there by the river at Limehouse, we talked a lot about his East End upbringing, first in Whitechapel, then in “a splendid council flat” in Manor House. His parents were Russian Jews, father “a moderately successful tailor” who gambled his profits, mother the driving force who gave her son “confidence, inordinate love, a sense of omnipotence” and the desire to better himself.
His background remains an obvious influence, particularly the warrior honour code adopted by male adolescents making their way in a hard area. “Jewish boys weren’t softies like today,” he says, mentioning that he’d just seen Vidal Sassoon in the local baths, “powering up and down the pool at 75”. Berkoff admits that as a kid he wanted to be one of the tough guys but wasn’t. His manner and appearance (the crop, the black clothes, the percussive diction) indicate he’s still striving after an elusive machismo.
“The mass,” he says, “the common man, the working man, his language is body, whether it’s in his football, boxing, dancing. The language of the establishment is the word.” He dismisses most other contemporary (and indeed, non-contemporary, Chekhov, for example) playwrights because their work is not dynamic and physical like his own. “I’m not interested in the quibbles and foibles of the neurotic middle classes.” Current theatre is variously “hopeless”, “awful” and “the worst thing I’ve seen in my life”. Most of it is phoney and dishonest. Dealing with people in Hollywood is much more straightforward. “If you can put bums on seats, hey, that’s good. Here, they fear you.”
Given that he feels so unappreciated, I ask, and given his alternative and very lucrative career in the Californian sunshine, why does he stay here in foggy old London? He replies: “I wonder, but you have within you this spirit, and this spirit is a kind of gift, this beast, this creature that must be vented and if you have a talent you musn’t let it go dormant for the sake of films which have a superficial frisson.” I think he’s wrong. I think he should concentrate on the superficial frisson, and give the beast, the creature, a good long rest.
