Steven Berkoff

An Introduction

Steven Berkoff is a practitioner who is best know for theatre directing and acting. He has acted in such things like the James Bond movie 'Octopussy', he also starred as Lt. Col Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II. He also is an author and playwright. Steven Berkoff is best known because of his impact on Physical Theatre.

His Theatre Work

Berkoff's work in theatre is enthralling, grotesque and very unique. A big influence on Berkoff was the great mime artist and practitioner Jacques Lecoq, this was great for Berkoff because he go the best training, much of Berkoffs work is derieved from Lecoq, for example the mime and melodramatic style movement. Even Berkoff's first theatre work was exceptionally unique and Lecoq like. His first piece was an adaptation on 'Franz Kafka's: The Metapmorphosis', he starred in this and brought the grotesque clockwork style into the piece. Many different techniques were used by Berkoff in this adaptation, for example the clockwork style nature that each movement is very static and has no flow. We also got to see the cast break the 4th wall which means looking out to the audience this element is great because it makes the audience feel uncomfortable and so they will remember it and it portrays the eerie life of Gregor Samsa. Another great method by Berkoff is the lack of facial expression when talking to the audience as the audience don't know what the character is feeling making them less human. His work has been described by a critic as 'The language is usually filthy', 'At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces the audience to react'. This is a great description of Berkoff's style is because its was so unseen and pushed the barrier of modern theatre.

Workshop

The first workshop we did on Berkoff was a piece from Agamemnon which Berkoff was in. This piece is grotesque and was very stylised which is Berkoff's forte. We were given a script as our stimulus and got into groups. I was with Sophie Adams, Brandon, Jake and Joe. I was happy to have Joe in my group as he had done work that was very grotesque before called Butoh, this type of theatre is Japanese and is very riveting to watch. We started off by devising our own piece using the script we found it difficult to start as it was such a difficult script to understand. Our group wanted to capture the clockwork, grotesque behaviour, sound scape and breaking the 4th wall in our piece. I felt that we eventually started to make progress through an idea by Sophie. The reason we weren't getting anywhere was because we were rejecting early ideas. I said that we should be in a circle around Brandon and that Brandon should be the speaker of the text. I thought Brandon would be best suited to this role as I feel he could be very emotionless and scary in front of the audience. We created a diamond around Brandon and on each line we would do something together in unison, and we tried to make it as static as possible to show this Berkovian style.

We did a second workshop on Berkoff, in this we did a Christmas clockwork piece. As it was around the right time of year we thought we would set our theme as Christmas. For this we got in a circle and did things that represented the presents being made in Santa's grotto. I was with Issie, Hannah, and Sophie A. For this exercise we focused on sound scaping. This effect is the process of making sound effects to match what you are doing, for example if I threw a ball I will make the sound of the ball going through the air. For this though, we thought that we would do a naughty and nice list. Hannah and Issie would stamp a sheet saying if they were naughty or nice, Hannah for naughty and Issie for Nice. After this happened Issie would pass Nice to me and Hannah would pass naughty to Sophie. When I got the sheet I fully opened my arms and gave the sheet a big kiss then to put it in the pile. For the kiss I used a sound effect to show one of Berkoff's many techniques. I also made my movement very static.

I enjoyed Berkoff's work as I found it fun and quite easy to do. As I find it fun to be over the top as it gives me energy.