`What I am trying to do is a theatrical recital, like an opera singer might do a concert. Because some of the Shakespeare pieces are like arias. They are like little essays, almost existing as philosophies in themselves." We are discussing Stephen Berkoff's one-man show, Shakespeare's Villains, subtitled A Masterclass in Evil in which, through a number of Shakespeare's characters, he explores the idea of villainy. As a writer, Berkoff is not used to performing without a script. Yet apart from the Shakespeare texts, the whole evening is improvised, with Berkoff as ringmaster, clown and high-wire act.
"It's been an extraordinary experience in that I've become a debater, a lecturer, a satirist, even a kind of part-time comedian dealing with all these different facets of different characters. A psychologist as well. I'm like a rubber tree leaching its rubber out. I keep finding different things, different stories. Some stories are invented, some are bizarre, some don't make sense at all. I just make comments on the whole ethos, if that's the word - the culture of acting. I talk about actors, what actors do, how we have to compete with legends of the past. I even talk about my cat. But I put in everything now. It enables me to come out and kind of meet with the audience, to confess to them, to open my heart and mind to them."
Heady stuff. But then, Berkoff has never been known for his reticence. He was born in the East End of London in 1939 and has been the joker in the English theatre's theatrical pack since he first hit the headlines in 1975 with his play East. The plays that followed, West, Decadence, Greek, Kvetch all use the same harsh language of the streets, all are emotionally raw explorations of sexual and family relationships that leave both cast and audience punch-drunk. He has done productions of Shakespeare - Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II and Coriolanus - productions he has usually ended up financing himself, through his other career, that of Hollywood screen villain. Around his vast docklands studio overlooking the Thames, angry canvasses of naked men struggle with each other, next to poster-sized photographs of London's poor in the 1950s and 1960s, taken by Berkoff himself, witness to his East End childhood. For some he is a maverick verging on genius; others see him as a deluded ego-manic. One critic - Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph - described his most recent play, Massage, as "florid, predictably obscene, melodramatic, masturbatory, self-regarding" and Berkoff himself as "an ageing enfant terrible".
Yet paradoxically, while Shakespeare remains the staple diet of take-no-risks theatre, the Bard's themes of love, power, passion and villainy are closer to the surface in Berkoff's work than in that of any other contemporary playwright. And there are other comparisons, he says. "Shakespeare worked with 15 actors, which is what I work with - between 12 and 15. They worked with no set, they had very few props and they had a multiplicity of roles which is exactly what I have been doing, except using the technology of the 20th century. I use the body, work with groups, using shapes, using mime." Mime and stylised movement is central to Berkoff's work, as anyone who caught his mould-breaking production of Oscar Wilde's Salome at the Gate will know. It later went on to the British National Theatre, followed by a world tour. "The responsibility for me creating it was really Michael Colgan at the Gate, and he took it to the Edinburgh Festival. I'd wanted to do Salome all my life. And while every lazy director and producer keeps regurgitating Oscar Wilde's plays of wit, nobody, but nobody, touches Salome, where he wanted to leave wit behind and go into his passion, into his heart and soul, into his beliefs, into his imagination."
The opportunity to do Salome at the National came solely, he believes, because Lawrence Olivier had just died and Joan Plowright had cancelled a production of Lorca, leaving the theatre with a hole to fill. ("Not that I am ungrateful. They could have found something else.") However, in London the play fell foul of both critics and audiences. ("The audience the National had been catering for years was artistically dead. Their senses and perceptions had been atrophied.") When we start on the subject of the press Berkoff becomes vituperative, pouring out a stream-of-consciousness monologue whose rhythms and cadences are familiar from his plays. ("Like little twerps, they come and spit and run away. And as they're running away I like to kick them up the arse and send them flying over the wall.")
The problem, he believes, is one of culture. And he reels off the places he has worked with success and acclaim: Japan, Germany, Israel, Australia, New York, Paris. "England is a mono-culture. A little bit simple. First of all it resists the body, it resists physical theatre, there's very little of it, except the "allowed" musical. (One or two groups come round and spin off again, like Complicite - but generally that's thought to be youth theatre.) But it resists any idea of the body being part of the theatre because it doesn't know how to use it. It's mainly in the voice and revolving stages provide the physicality.
"In the 1960s the people who were starting to come into the theatre were academics from the universities, but they hadn't trained, they weren't theatre workers. They saw the theatre as talking heads, because they had no other means. What do these people know about the body? They know about sets, construction, materialism. So I feel that to a great extent they have destroyed the fabric of the theatre because they haven't passed on the techniques. When actors were in charge of the theatre, good or bad, there was a technique they imparted to the other actors."
He finds little to enjoy in the English theatre now. "It is so limp, so ego-struck, so simple in its ambition, that any movie star with a little bit of talent can come in and get away with it. I'm not judging anyone. But it does imply that the theatre is reaching amateur levels. I would like it to reach operatic levels. You couldn't go on the stage and dance for the Royal Ballet if you hadn't been on the ballet stage for 10 years, but you can somehow get away with it in the theatre. So therefore I want to make the theatre more complicated technically, dynamically and physically." NOT surprisingly, given his very un-English mix of iconoclasm and Messianic belief in his version of his art, Berkoff has few friends at the top. His very prolificness seems to send shudders through the theatrical establishment. He has written not only plays, but a novel, short stories and autobiography and he has recently published Graft: Tales Of An Actor in which he disarmingly and provocatively dissects the actor's life-cycle from student to death.
However, he believes it is the dominance of directors in the English theatre that has led to his effective isolation. "No actor or actors or even directors should ever run theatres. That's the problem. They're in competition with each other. It becomes power-based. The Russian, German and usually French way of doing it is that the head of the theatre is an intendant, an administrator. Like Michael Colgan. He has no jealousy or resentment to me or anyone else because he's not competing." Like several other English actors, Berkoff has benefited from American actors' distaste for playing villains. Far from despising the Hollywood film factory, he says, it's a wonderful relief. "It is nice not to have the responsibility: and I like the sheer, brutal, materialistic honesty of it all.
They have to make money, they have to get good actors, they have to get it right on the nail, and I love getting away from that airy fairy bullshit of London and the crappy reverence to simple trash. "There's an honesty in Hollywood that doesn't begin to exist here. If you can deliver the goods, they want you. If you deliver the goods here, they don't want you. If you are successful here, you will find it very difficult to work, because the main theatre is subsidised so people don't care, but in Hollywood the criterion is whether you can put bums on seats, whether your personae can sell some more cinema tickets. It's not who you are, who you know, where you went to university."
"The thing with Berkoff," said a voice behind me the night I saw Shakespeare's Villains, "is you either love him or you hate him. There's no middle ground." The audience the night I was there gave him a standing ovation.
Shakespeare's Villains is at the Olympia from Monday to Friday. Stephen Berkoff will be reading from Graft: Tales of an Actor at Waterstone's, Dawson Street on Wednesday at 6 p.m.