Steven Berkoff has always played on his image as one of the bad boys of British theatre. In 1980, the then Guardian critic Nick de Jongh described his Hamlet at the Roundhouse as “fatally miscast”. Berkoff’s response was to threaten to kill de Jongh when he met him one evening in London (Berkoff later said the threat was a joke). He was sacked from his first West End role in The Amorous Prawn by Anthony Kimmins “for assaulting the fatally dull stage manager”. When the dress rehearsal for Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1965 was significantly delayed, he went ballistic, charging down to the auditorium to shout and howl at the director and cast of another show. “It was the outburst of a hysterical, insecure actor,” writes Berkoff, as he looks back on an astonishing 60-year career in this indecently entertaining autobiography.
Perhaps some of that insecurity can be traced back to Berkoff’s upbringing. He was born in 1937 into a family of Russian and Romanian Jewish descent. During the war, he was evacuated to Luton, but in a mark of the obstinate, bloody-minded spirit that would define his career, he simply hollered until his mother was forced to return to pick him up.
At school, at Hackney Downs Grammar School, five years behind Harold Pinter, he was miserable. The old Jewish East End, as vanished now as the world of “weekly rep” that he appeared in as a young actor, is beautifully evoked here through food and tribalism. In Roggs’ deli in Whitechapel his mother would buy her weekly stipend of smoked salmon, asking for extra skin, which the teenage Berkoff would run over his teeth for extra bits of fish that the fishmonger’s knife missed. There are teenage scenes of street fighting shtarkers (tough guys) and punch-ups outside the Royal Dance Hall in Tottenham, where the rules inside were Jews on the left, gentiles on the right. Yet Berkoff was restless and, perhaps fuelled with self-loathing. Describing himself as a “useless blob of flesh”, he leaves school at 15 only to drift into petty crime, becoming briefly incarcerated in a detention centre for stealing bicycles. Throughout his father is notably absent. Instead, “the man called my father” is forever in the spieler (gambling den), awaiting his “big win”.
But then, while training as a menswear salesman in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1956, Berkoff discovered Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and something was sparked within him. Returning to London he was accepted into the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art where he was in the same class as Terence Stamp. There is a tang of bitterness when he notes Stamp becomes a star almost immediately, whilst Berkoff is resigned to small theatrical roles.
From that point on, Berkoff set about establishing a uniquely visceral theatrical legacy. He became fascinated by the French maestro Jacques Lecoq’s teachings of the mechanics of mime, and in 1965 began classes in with Lecoq in Paris. For his first full production of Metamorphosis at Lamda in 1969, he hung upside down from a scaffolded steel set like a beetle. When the production moved to the Roundhouse, Berkoff described his experience as transcendent. “I crossed the border between life and death […] between pointlessness and inspiration.” Metamorphosis would become one of his greatest artistic triumphs: “Metamorphosis stayed with me for a very long time,” he writes. “I did productions in Australia, LA, Dusseldorf, Tel Aviv…” 1969 also saw his first trip to Israel. He was invited by the writer Wolf Mankowitz to join a film production but ended up working as a road labourer in Eilat, where, intriguingly, he felt totally at home.
In Britain, Berkoff has always been one of theatre’s great outsiders, throwing furious punches from the sidelines rather than placidly conforming to the mainstream. Where the theatre establishment was in thrall, as it always has been, to naturalism, and the primacy of the text, Berkoff was dreaming in the wild demotic poetry that fuelled some of his greatest plays: his 1975 debut East, a sharp, stylised, verse play set among the sex-mad juveniles of his East End youth; Greek, a retelling of Oedipus Rex, in 1980.
It would take decades for British theatre to embrace physical theatre as a mainstream idea, but for Berkoff, there was never any other way. His visionary, pugilistic spirit was way ahead of its time: both East and Greek are now seen as early examples of the in-yer-face theatre movement that dominated British theatre in the 1990s.
Yet Berkoff would soon establish another identity – as a Hollywood master villain. He played Orlov in Octopussy in 1983; the British art dealer and drug lord Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop in 1984. The next year he appeared in Rambo: First Blood Part II. For him his film career was always what enabled him to continue in the theatre. “My theatre work… was the work I was most proud of,” he writes. His film work simply provided him with the “extra freedom… to finance, on occasion, my own work”. All the same, the showbiz anecdotes from this aspect of his career are a highlight: “It will be a long time until I forget the ‘click-clack-click’ of Prince’s high-heeled boots marching around the 1986 set of Under the Cherry Moon like a Paisley Park Lord Farquaad.”
Shouting at Night offers a rich social and cultural tour through a mid-century London that is now utterly changed, from the new, post-war council flat in Hackney where the teenage Berkoff lived like “working class royalty” to the Chelsea demi-monde of the early 1960s where hungry actors washed dishes in French bistros. It also tells the personal story of a player and writer of indefatigable energy, unlike anyone else this country has produced. There is surely no other memoir in which you would find the sentence: “It was a welcome relief, after restaging Greek in LA and New York, and then a European tour of Hamlet, to be offered the role of a Russian general in a Bond movie”. Berkoff will be 90 next year. Long may he continue to shout at night.
Shouting at Night: From East End Rebel to Hollywood’s Master Villain, by Steven Berkoff, is published by Supernova Books
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