KEY POINTS:
How did the interview with Steven Berkoff go? The publicist wanted to know; they usually do, but there was a note of apprehension. Interviews with the famously combative playwright and actor have a way of going awry. I still don't know the answer to the question.
I said, at the end, "Well, you were hardly cranky at all." He said, very grumpily: "I'm not cranky." If he's not, surely he can take a bit of a tease?
I don't know the answer to that question, either. His was: "The crankiest people are the most critical people, the most vain people ... You know, you could say that even about Jesus. He made his opinions felt of what he believed in and that's what an actor is - basically he's just a kind of preacher."
That "the most vain people" was him getting me back for asking if he was appallingly conceited. I only asked because it is the most amazing of the things people write about him, but don't ask. He said, glaring: "Ask me what?" Whether, I said, quaking rather, "you are appallingly conceited?" But he just shrugged and said, mildly, "Well, how does a person know that?"
This is a good answer but I think I know how such an observation might be mischievously arrived at. I did enjoy him, but it is almost impossible to make him a sympathetic character when you put him on a page. Perhaps it is too easy to confuse the man with his work. He is very good at playing the bad guys: a drug dealer in Beverly Hills Cop, a villain in Rambo, half a dozen of the bard's really bad buggers in his Shakespeare's Villains, which he put on here in 2005. As a playwright and actor he is punchy, edgy, physically tough - and his characters like an expletive.
"A man whose talent to pick a fight is almost as big as his talent to entertain," is one of many kindred observations. He sighed and said, "They can pigeonhole in a way if they wish, but people of low culture will make silly, banal comments. But that's not bad. But I don't pick a fight."
Don't you? I said, probably banally. "No. I defend what I feel are unjust comments or abusive comments against me. I don't even bother with that now, but I did, yes, and that obviously puts you in the firing line. Instead of saying, 'What a gift Berkoff is for the British race, what gifts he's giving us, the newness of his theatre, his choice of subject, how we need it', instead they say [to be said in a mincing, silly voice], 'Oh, pick a fight'. It's banal."
I really shouldn't have asked why he sued journalist Julie Burchill for writing, among other things, that he was hideously ugly. This seemed like a mad thing to do but he says, "Oh, it was only partly that", and "The poor woman has a very severe mental problem ... It was an ongoing thing, and in the end we had enough. She's a devious, slimy and ugly woman". At which point I shrieked: "You've just called her ugly!"
"Well, she's got an ugly nature. Yes, she's not very pretty anyway. She's a bit of a podge. That's what made it so funny."
We were both sniggering and I said: "So it was one of your jokes?" "No, no. I just said: because she was abusive. Don't you hear me?" and so on and on, very crankily.
Honestly, he said it was funny, so to ask whether it was a joke seemed reasonable to me, but not him. He is now looking pointedly at his watch.
This ought to be very rude indeed but I found it impossible to be offended by him. He gets in terrible rages about almost everything - film actors who don't act, the amount of packaging involved in making a cup of tea in his hotel room, but it's all heat and no flame and purely entertaining.
He has the most incredible talent for finding trouble inside the most innocuous question. I asked about his friendship with Ian McKellen. He said they weren't close "but he's a mate and I respect him".
But then - he really can't help himself - he started on "that twaddle" McKellen had done. The Lord of the Rings? "Yeah, that twaddle with the long hair." I did encourage him a bit but he didn't need any help. "Unfortunately it is twaddle. Boring and cutesy and millions of battle scenes and effects and funny faces."
He has earlier told me that he is behaving himself these days. "You're not behaving yourself at all, are you?" I say now. "Ye-ees," he says, like a 6-year-old boy who has just been caught, not at all contritely, writing rude words about another boy on a wall. Anyway, I say, he's done some twaddle.
"I've never done twaddle." Umm, Rambo. "That's not twaddle. You see, that's for four or five weeks. He [McKellen] did a year. That becomes twaddle. Four or five weeks, that becomes an investment."
I see him in Melbourne playing in a "not for profit" down-on-its-luck theatre, in that most demanding theatrical pursuit: the one-man touring show. I think this is a bit sad, that he's playing in such shabby surrounds (not that I'd dare show it; how he'd hate that.) But I did ask why a playwright and actor of his years and status is still doing such hard slog. He says he needs the money.
"Unfortunately, yes. It's shocking, I know." Well, it is. His early plays were triumphs and he's done enough film that he should have enough to retire on. "I don't want to be retiring now." He's 71. "Bah! That's nothing. I feel while you have the energy and the power you're depriving an audience."
But why hasn't he got any money? "I'm conned a lot of the time, ripped off, then the taxes rip you off, theatres rip you off." Then there are the "charming twerps" who have turned his projects down and the producers who are difficult and go for the safe, obvious options. I can see why he's still on the stage. He has to have somewhere to direct his raging energy, otherwise he'd wear himself out within a year. He wore me out within an hour with his contrariness. He phoned me later in the day to say he didn't want me to think that he meant all producers because the one putting on his current tour is lovely to him.
He couldn't help but insert a little gripe about how hard he's working. He says he's more relaxed these days and he still takes things seriously but "not myself". I wondered if he thought he'd become a nicer person. I thought he might think this a banal question but he considered it kindly. "Well, I think you do because if you're not nice, people will react to you and feel you're a bit obstreperous, and difficult. But I've become very nice."
He said that being 71 is "a gift from God that you can reach that age and still get out of bed without a Zimmer frame and still have a twinkle in your eye for the occasional filly". He once said he fell madly in love every seven years. Surely not now? "Ah! It's mandatory that a man should fall in love every seven years. It's to revive the system, to get you all psychologically kind of chewed up, to get the nerves all reverberating. No, that's quite normal."
What, I ask, horrified, does his wife think of this? "Oh, she doesn't mind at all as long as I don't bring it near the house. But I don't do that any more." So, what, he just has a look? "Mainly that's better. Because I found in the past, women are so unpredictable and emotionally unstable that it's best not to have too much to do with them if you can possibly avoid it."
I have no idea whether he believes this nonsense. He has fun saying it; he got a great deal of enjoyment out of the look on my face.
He ought to be infuriating; somehow he manages to be engaging. Perhaps it is because, despite the bluster, there is that prickly vulnerability hidden, but not very deep. You have to listen for it. It's fleeting and it looks like arrogance, written down.
There it is in his earlier complaint about how his gift "for the British race" is not celebrated. Not that he would admit to being hurt. I asked and he said: "Don't forget England is only one little damp patch ... They write about me in Germany, in Japan even and Israel, Italy, Spain. My plays are translated all over the world."
So you go, in the space of a minute, from feeling a bit soft about him to wanting to wring his neck.
I saw his show, One Man. It is two short plays: Tell-Tale Heart, an adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe story about a mad old murderous man; and Dog, a Berkoff-penned story in which he plays a mad, ageing skinhead and his pit bull, Roy.
Dog's owner orders audience members: "Go on, pat him. He's all right." If I'd been in the front row, I wouldn't have. "They have to pat him," he says. I wouldn't. "You would have." I would not. "You would have done because I come down and I say, `Pat him. Go on'. It's only a bit of fun."
Only with Berkoff - the man who never picks a fight - could you get into a ridiculous argument over a dog that doesn't exist. It's only a bit of fun. He's all right, really, once you figure out that his bark is much worse than his bite.
One Man: Opera House, Wellington, October 15 & 16; Aotea Centre, Auckland, October 17 &18.
