Berkoff speaks bluntly

There exists a piece of music by the composer Gavin Bryars in which the looped singing of an unnamed tramp rises above an increasingly dense cacophony of strings. Such is the breadth of Steven Berkoff’s points of reference, that our conversation, early on, meanders towards this favourite of mine. “That was me,” he reveals, to my extreme surprise. “It was a put-up job. I was playing a beggar in a show and they said, ‘why don’t you go up the corner of Brick Lane and put a bit of a gig on,’ you see. So I did this old song – an old cockney song.” Excerpts from the transcript —excerpts which shall remain unpublished here—reveal an interviewer struggling to contain his excitement. And then a further revelation: “No, I’m joking.”

Last week, the acclaimed actor, writer and director (not to mention one-time collaborator with the hardcore techno group, N-trance) turned 71. There’s an early lesson here for for credulous interviewers who approach Berkoff expecting anything akin to the sedate responses becoming of a 71-year-old. He proves consistently disarming: we meet to discuss the project he directs, a stage adaptation of On the Waterfront – Budd Schulberg’s Oscar-winning film about 1950’s New York longshoremen and a former prizefighter (played by Marlon Brando) who informs against the corrupt, controlling mobsters. I have him read a few lines from his collection of prose and poetry, America. I’m interested in his fondness for the American super-hero, and whether that same attraction might be found in Waterfront’s working-class hero, Terry Malloy: America was for me / an utter supreme fantasy / when I was still with sticky hands / unfolding the wonders of Batman.”

“It’s fantastic poetry! It’s really bloody good,” he exclaims, unashamedly. “Don’t lose the book. Oh, it’s the library’s.” Worth stealing, I ask? “It might be, yeah!” I think the old man is serious.

Berkoff’s On The Waterfront has already garnered a great deal of interest. The decision to transfer to the stage a film considered by many to be one of the cinematic highlights of the 20th Century was always going to get attention: “I was fascinated by the idea before I read the play. Of course, it’s one of those films, what do you call it, you know, it’s a keynote really. It contains such a huge moral statement and it touches everybody, and it was performed in exemplary fashion. And it carried something that we all missed.”

This “huge moral statement,” I suggest, needs narrowing down: “here’s something that speaks to everybody,” he says. “It spoke to the common man; it spoke to the adult; it spoke to the child; it spoke to every human being and it gave us a sense of what we have missed; it made us aware of out feelings of compassion and justice; it awoke that in us like an avalanche, as great films can.”

“You know, our values have been so trampled on...”. The dramatic pause here is delicious – long enough, even, to add milk to coffee and stir thoroughly. It’s a handy reminder that Berkoff is, through-and-through, an actor, and it’s well to remember that most of Berkoff’s answers are laced with a carefully crafted frankness. That’s not to say that he is disingenuous – he is clearly not. Rather, Berkoff knows exactly how to make his claims stick convincingly, how to make them appear unanswerable. So he continues: “...trampled upon by second-class art. Second-class, third-rate trash, not only in movies, but in theatre – and painting, particularly.”

Whatever Berkoff’s art of persuasion, he is clearly not afraid to pick targets. Later, he praises On the Waterfront for its discovery of poetry in the dirt of the working-class: “it shows that in the working-class there is an incredible poetry of language, of gesture, of emotion, of attitude, of speech patterns.” (For the record, Berkoff’s impression of Marlon Brando—”I coulda been somebody...I coulda had class”—is rather good.) Becoming irate, however, he accuses the English of studiously avoiding or sidelining this working-class poetry: “we’re left with the same wanking tossers writing the same wanking plays, for God’s sake.”

He continues: “occasionally something comes up, and what the film did, it showed you the incredible suffering, the incredible desire to improve...[So], when I saw the play I decided to stage it as a homage to the film.” The production’s passage to the stage, however, has not been entirely clear: “I wanted to keep the film. Budd Schulberg’s thing was different. He wanted to expand the film, to show a bit more of the background of the play, develop the characters a bit more. And so here we may have had a slight parting of the waves, but it’s all right, we’ve come to some sort of compromise.” What ‘compromise’ means here, in fact, is that Berkoff had his own way. “My criteria for it was ‘we’re not going to compromise,’ we’re doing the movie onstage,” he says, somewhat contradictorily. The result is a play which follows the movie exactly.

There is a further contradiction here. The film’s power, it’s visceral depiction of violence and coercion stems directly from the its painstaking realism and, in particular, from the method school of acting practised by Brando et al.. Berkoff’s method, developed through work such as his adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, involves what has been termed "total theatre" – highly stylised, minutely choreographed physical theatre. Berkoff, in short, has always been the arch-enemy of naturalism on the stage. His answer is simple, and unexpected: “well, we’re using realism in this play. So the structure of the play is very much a heightened realism, but the actors are still acting the same as if it were in a film.”

It would be a mistake, however, to confuse Berkoff’s cryptic reference to “heightened realism” with Brando’s brand of realism. A great deal of praise has been heaped on Berkoff’s slow motion, highly choreographed sequences. This is “super realism”. The acting is “bigger, more detailed.” Rather than battle against realism, Berkoff, instead, outdoes it. The same goes for his actors: he says of Simon Merrells, playing Terry Malloy, “I think he’s pound-for-pound the equal of Brando.”

Such is the Brando mystique that some might find this sacreligious. But for all his bolshiness, one can’t help but be impressed by Berkoff’s commitment to theatre, and by his faith in the power of live performance: “Film is film and you can do anything on film. But stage is more magic craft...It gives it much greater impact. You know, you go see The Lost World with, like, 100 dinosaurs. So next time the director says ‘gimme 100 dinosaurs and whaddaya want? A pterodactyl?’ It’s easy bollocks. But to put that on stage. That requires supreme art.”