There’s a wonderful scene in Wes Anderson’s film ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ that I can’t help thinking of at one point during DU Players Audience with Steven Berkoff, the acclaimed English actor, playwright, author and director. In the scene in question, Eli Cash (played by Owen Wilson), himself an acclaimed author, is having trouble coming to terms with some of his literary reviews. “Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s NOT a genius?” he moans over the phone to an unseen confidante. “Do you especially think I’m NOT a genius?” There is a pitch perfect pause and then the doleful response of an artist whose livelihood depends on the opinions of others: “You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?” I reference this scene because Steven Berkoff is similarly a man who has had to twist and battle with the confinements of mainstream theatrical critics. Anecdotally, in fact, he is rumoured to be the the only person to have ever threatened to kill a theatre critic. When asked to comment on this, he responds, “Of course. That’s what you do when you’re an actor. I’m not a balanced person.” The critic in question had said that Berhoff was “fatally miscast” as Hamlet. “Why fatally?” Berkhoff asks. “Why not just ‘miscast’?”
Steven Berkoff is a very entertaining guest speaker. He speaks passionately on his love for the theatre and the arts and it’s very difficult for the listener not to latch on to this. The drama in his voice is tangible, positively quivering, as he describes the reasons he became an actor as a young Londoner. “As an actor, you have an instinct to fulfil yourself. The theatre is like a kind of therapy, some kind of ritual…like a religious system, a calling. It’s something inside you that you want to express and you feel it stronger and stronger. I’m an actor because for me it was life or death. My life is affirmed by this extraordinary nuclear action. For others, it was a career.” He speaks in similarly animated tones about his writing: “I wanted to write things that were coming from my intestines, from the deepest part of my being. That may sound a little hyperbolic, but that’s the way I felt.”
All of this is communicated with flourishes, hand gestures and a voice resonating deeply with booming emotion. The effect is absorbing, certainly, but a very clichéd representation of the acting community: paradoxically becoming tedious and predictable in its drama. When Berkoff turns his attention towards what he sees as the flaws of today’s conventional theatre, however, the audience is treated to a rant of a grumpy old gentleman, worthy of Victor Meldrew himself. He describes a typical visit to the theatre for many: “Your brain is a writhing cesspit. The snakes are eating away at your brain until you can’t take it anymore so you fall asleep. That’s why so many people fall asleep at the theatre…The brain needs to be attacked on so many levels.” Berkoff is fully aware that he has his audience entertained, that we are waiting and listening for his viewpoint. “It’s a filtered theatre, like the kind of golf club that bans Jews. It’s not just theatre either, look at painting! What a shithole! They’re laughing at you while they take your money. Making tents about who screwed them,” he continues in a reference to Tracy Emin’s infamous tent presentation. Despite this, Berkoff remains stubbornly optimistic however that there is hope for the future of theatre as an art form. “People keep going to the theatre because they are hopeful. They’re thinking ‘maybe the next one!’”
