Review: Diary of a Juvenile Delinquent - The Jewish Chronicle

By Steven Berkoff
JR Books £18.99

Despite the title, this is not a diary but a memoir. It looks back with a great deal of anger at a childhood that could have easily led to a life of petty crime and underachievement. Instead, it led to a career as a writer, theatre director and creator of some of the most distinctive stage productions this country has seen. Moreover, taking advantage of those blue eyes and chiselled features, Steven Berkoff has also carved out a lucrative career as a Hollywood villain.

In the theatre, the Berkoff reputation is built partly on plays and partly on his ferocious responses to the more wounding reviews doled out by drama critics. He famously threatened to kill one of them, though he now dismisses the episode as a joke.

Another reviewer admitted to attending Biblical Tales, Berkoff's most recent production, in August, with trepidation after Berkoff had banned him from productions.

To this, it is worth adding that, if Berkoff has a sense of injustice, it is not entirely unfounded. He has produced some very fine stage work, such as the muscular depictions of thuggery in East or his visceral adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, without ever being embraced by the theatrical establishment.

There was a period, not very long ago, when Berkoff was seen - unfairly I thought at the time - as a spent force in theatre, a view he proved wrong with a barnstorming return to form in his adaptation of On the Waterfront.

So, fans and critics alike will hope that this memoir will reveal the source of the anger that has driven this proudly Jewish, 73-year-old enfant terrible. But, for someone who has carved a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices on the British stage, he gives you an awful lot of plodding prose to wade through before that voice eventually emerges.

The material is rich, the family huge. Between them, his parents had 17 siblings. Berkoff was brought up in the driving poverty of London's East End "dodging bombs" in the blitz before he and his sister Beryl were evacuated to Luton.

More glamorously, after the war there was a period in New York, where they lived with his mother's family, though this was a miserable time for "Ma" while she waited for Berkoff's often absent father to join them.

Much of this is described in a pared-down style so sparse, I thought the author was parodying a school essay written by the eponymous juvenile. (I can almost hear Berkoff bristle at the notion: "Berkoff does not do parody! It is he who is parodied!"

But when that voice comes through unadorned, it is in the form of moving confessions - he became a teenage father - and revelations, such as the fact that his father's neglect prevented Berkoff from having a barmitzvah, something Steven resents to this day.

And his pneumatic descriptions of teenage sex have that staccato rhythm which was later transformed into a kind of decadent aggression when deployed on stage.

He left education - at Hackney Downs School he remembers Pinter's teacher belatedly acknowledging that Berkoff had some talent - with seething memories of corporal punishment and went into the world with little parental encouragement - none at all from his tailor father.

Life as an unskilled office worker and stealer of bikes, for which he was sent to Borstal, beckoned.

This ultimately winning portrait is of a sensitive boy who could be tough when he had to but who was starved of love. But don't feel too sorry: all this pain made this sometimes angry but essentially creative adult what he is, to theatregoers' lasting benefit.