Berkoff brings his evil ways back to NZ

Steven Berkoff

Whichever way you look at it, Steven Berkoff does a good bad guy. It's his pleasure and his profession. It has also made what passes for his fortune - not to mention most of his fame.

Berkoff's most widely seen bad guys are cardboard-cutout caricatures in blockbusters: a Russian villain in the first Rambo film and in an early James Bond flick, a drug dealer in Beverly Hills Cop, and a gangster (Russian, again) in the 2000 film Rancid Aluminium, the making of which he likened to "standing knee-deep in shit".

"I've been very grateful to the film industry for employing me, even if it's sometimes crap," he says on the phone from his home in Brighton on England's south coast, "because it enables me to continue in the theatre.

"Sometimes it's very tedious and dreary because you're working with actors who only do films and take their own puny efforts so seriously. But I appreciate the work."

Not all the screen credits - several dozen that stretch back to 1958 - are in questionable films. That's Berkoff, unrecognisably young, as the lank-haired cop interrogating Malcolm McDowell's Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. He had small roles in the same director's Barry Lyndon and in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger. But he is the first to admit his finest hours have not been on the big screen.

The stage is another matter entirely. For 30 years Berkoff has been an inventive, challenging and irresistible force on the fringes of British theatre. An iconoclast both by temperament and professional inclination, he has carved a niche for himself with his edgy and inventive interpretations of classics (for example, a Hamlet in which the prince and Ophelia collude) and striking, experimental original works that raid traditions as diverse as Artaud and kabuki.

Along the way he has raised eyebrows. In 1975, when four-letter words were uncommon in films, much less on the stage - he used the "c" word 29 times in a 90-second monologue at the Edinburgh Festival.

His provocations are as often political as creative. In 2001, he put his hand up for the job of running the National Theatre. He could run it from his bed, he said, and would start by firing the management. He was not shortlisted.

For all that he is not prepared to concede that he is contemptuous of most mainstream theatre. "It's not contempt, exactly. But to a certain extent it's natural to be contemptuous of work that you feel is robbing people of the possibility of really invigorating, exciting theatre. It's abuse. It insults them. It steals their money and so you can't have anything less than a certain amount of contempt for that."

So is there nothing worth watching on Broadway or in the West End?

"The mainstream - the West End and Broadway - only survive because the alternative theatre provides interesting new directors and ideas and artists. While the establishment theatre is generally very moribund, it gets fed from time to time by a small injection. So there are some good things - or reasonable, let's not go overboard - and then the doors are shut and the alternative theatre gets to rot in the dark again."

Berkoff's work is familiar to Auckland theatregoers with long memories. His semi-autobiographical plays of East End working-class life, East and Kvetch, verbally pyrotechnic melodramas that were at once poetic and profane, received excellent productions at the Maidment 12 years ago and his adaptation of Franz Kafka's nightmarish Metamorphosis was an early hit at Theatre Corporate in the mid-80s.

And now Berkoff is heading this way, bringing his well-regarded one-man show Shakespeare's Villains to Auckland for four nights next month.

The blend of ironic lecture and stand-up soliloquy showcases a half dozen of the Bard's bad guys: Iago, the Macbeths, Shylock (you bet), Richard III (of course) and Hamlet (a serial killer).

Not surprisingly, his is an unconventional take on some villainous standards. Othello's lieutenant and scheming nemesis, Iago, for example, is not the received version but "a mediocre villain".

"He suffers from the great sin of mediocrity that, combined with villainy, makes him dangerous. We mediocre people have to put up with what we've got and try to make the most of it. But some mediocre people want to cut anyone down who overshadows them, to hurt or cripple them whenever they can, in a fit of jealousy. Here is a case where Shakespeare shows how evil a mediocre person can be."

Berkoff's distaste for critics is well known. When in 1979 Guardian theatre critic Nicholas De Jongh described Berkoff as "fatally miscast" in a production of Hamlet, Berkoff reportedly made a death threat to the critic during a chance meeting in a pub. He described another writer who had said he was too old for a certain role as "fat, slobby and balding".

Berkoff, who later described the death threat as a joke, now brushes it aside. "We had a few verbals and it got in the paper, but since then Nick and I have become friends and he's a great supporter," he says. "But in the early days, when my plays were being really attacked, I was fighting to defend them - my plays were my children. And there were a few critics who thought that since I was in the fringe they could take the piss. They had a fixed idea of the theatre - principally naturalistic and simplistic - and my work uses a variety of influences and symbols.

"Some critics didn't like it. But instead of saying, 'This is not for me', they would insult me. It was a kind of nasty, very English thing, like a colonial attitude in which the outsider became a sort of substitute for the black. If you wrote that sort of stuff about Jews or blacks you'd go to jail.

"I think critics have come on a bit," he concludes, conceding that he has had a good run from some critics who have passionately endorsed his work.

Returning to the real villains, Berkoff contrasts Iago with "that genius villain", Richard III, who "wants to put out of the way hundreds of people, whole hosts, tribes, nations", and agrees that most actors would rather play villains than heroes.

"A villain is much more complicated," he explains. "He presents a dual face, a Janus face to the world. He has to appear to be honest and then have another side. The hero is generally very motivated in just one direction.

"I must say I do like that purity of vision at times, but most actors like playing villains."

Performance

* Who: Steven Berkoff in Shakespeare's Villains: A Masterclass in Evil

* Where & when: Bruce Mason Centre, March 2-4; Civic Theatre, Mar 5,6