Reviews

Shakespeare's Villains at Vicar Street, Dublin: Steven Berkoff's stage persona is a bundle of apparent contradictions. A distinguished playwright with a relish for demotic language, his acting style is rooted in the non-verbal forms he learned from the French mime school of Jacques le Coq.

A serious and passionate classicist, he is probably best known to the general public as a comic-book villain in James Bond and Beverly Hills Cop movies. An imperious director, he yet claims sovereignty for the actor.

Shakespeare's Villains, which played at Vicar Street, a venue not usually associated with drama, might be seen as an attempt to fuse these qualities. It is, at once, highly literary and unashamedly populist, luxuriating in stylised language but full of physical clowning. The pity is that, instead of being a showcase for the extraordinary range of Berkoff's talents, it exposes his self-indulgence more effectively than his virtuosity.

The piece is like some mythical animal, with the head of a traditional one-man show, the body of a stand-up comedian and the tail of an entertaining, if somewhat egotistical, first year college lecturer.

Berkoff performs bits of Othello, Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He does a stand-up routine reflecting on the absurdities of theatrical life. And he expounds, sometimes brilliantly, on the plays themselves.

Since Berkoff is, for all his variety of talents, essentially an actor, it might be expected that the most successful part of the show would be the actual performance of passages from the plays. On the analogy of the kind of concert that more usually inhabits the Vicar Street stage, these would be the songs and the rest would be the patter.

In fact, it turns out to be the other way around. Berkoff is often at his best almost as an academic critic. Much of what he has to say about the characters he characterises - very loosely - as villains, is highly arguable but almost all of it is incisive and illuminating. When he is not indulging himself in long drawn-out diversions, he can be pithy and precise.

He reminds us, for example, that Iago is essentially mediocre in his villainy and that it is he, not Othello, who is consumed by jealousy.

He sums up the strange conjunction of sex and violence in Richard III by characterising him memorably as a man who, since he cannot make hearts beat faster through love, will make them beat in fear.

Even for those of us allergic to Freudian interpretations of Shakespeare his linking of Hamlet and Coriolanus through their relationships with their mothers is pleasantly provocative.

In this guise as Prof Berkoff, he is the kind of lecturer any student would love to have: witty, stimulating, jargon-free and great fun.

The problem, strangely, is with the acting. Berkoff can be a stupendous performer. His dangerous, edgy style of physical and verbal exaggeration has a magnetic power when it is elaborated through a production that plays by Berkoff's own rules. If you run in from a standing start, however, it seems extraordinarily crude. As Berkoff shifts from stand-up mode to theatrical performance and back again, it produces hammy caricatures, not just of the Shakespearean roles, but of a variety of ethnic types. Othello becomes an Afro-Caribbean pimp, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth a couple of Glasgow hard-chaws, Shylock an East London Jew from central casting.

It feels like watching a series of Warner Brothers cartoons. One or two is fine, but after a while it all becomes a little tiresome.

The show hovers ever more uncomfortably between an appreciation of Shakespeare and a burlesque, with Berkoff playing at once the hero of the hour and the villain of the piece.