The Berkoff Performing Arts Centre was named for him at Alton College, in North East Hampshire on 20 June 2008.įor this book I'm going to do individual reviews for each play. Brian May has declared himself as a great admirer of Berkoff. "I'm scared of Steven Berkoff" is a line in the lyrics of "I'm Scared" (1992), by Queen's guitarist Brian May, released on his first solo album Back to the Light (1993). It is the kind of theatre that inspires us to use superlatives, whether in praise or condemnation."Īccording to Annette Pankratz, in her 2005 Modern Drama review of Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance, by Robert Cross, "Steven Berkoff is one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain and – due to his self-fashioning as a bad boy of British theatre and the ensuing attention of the media – a phenomenon in his own right." At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen, and want all their friends to see it too. Drama critic Aleks Sierz describes his Berkoff's dramatic style as "in yer face": "the language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each another, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent.
East, Greek and West were punk-inspired works about working class London youth based on Oedipus and Beowulf respectively.īerkoff employs a style of heightened physical theatre known as "total theatre". In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote a series of verse plays including: East (1975) Greek (1980) Decadence (1981) West (1983) Sink the Belgrano! (1986) Massage (1997) Sturm und Drang and The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001). His earliest plays are adaptations of works by Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1969) In the Penal Colony (1969) and The Trial (1971) these complex psychological plays are said to be nightmarish and to create a disturbing sense of alienation in their audiences. Col Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II, Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop, and Adolf Hitler in epic mini-series War and Remembrance. Steven Berkoff is an English actor, writer and director.Best known for his performance as General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy, he is typically cast in villanous roles, such as Lt.
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