The man’s a legend and at 71 he’s astonishing – his energy, vitality, commitment to the style of acting he loves, his presence and attitude are undiminished.

It’s 10 years since Steven Berkoff first performed these two short plays, The Tell-Tale Heart adapted from an Edgar Alan Poe short story, and his own play Dog. 

He didn’t miss a beat despite extraneous noise from talkative latecomers, the alleyway outside, and two errant cell phones.

The Poe tale is of a mad man, who argues he just has over-acute senses, who murders an old man, dismembers him (beautifully performed by Berkoff including a little soccer with the head) and buries him under the floorboards.

Dog is of Roy the dog and his drunken truck-driving master, both rough as guts and mirrors of each other except Roy prefers pies to downing 40 pints of lager at the pub of a night.

And yet… despite his mastery, both plays were less than engaging. The subject matter won’t resonate with all, certainly One Man doesn’t have the general appeal of his Shakespeare’s Villains.

We see precious little expressionist theatre here and it may be a shock to those who like their theatre naturalistic. Certainly a few people on my row left at half time. That’s a shame, he’s worth watching and in a world of so-so Hollywood actors, he is his own man.

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With an Australasian tour that takes in more than a dozen venues, Steven Berkoff is doing what he does best – delivering his own brand of "in yer face" theatre, honing his formidable skills and hopefully finding sustenance in the sparks that flow between a performer and a live audience.

Still on the road at the age of 71, he may be starting to feel like the Ancient Mariner who was compelled to wander the Earth and tell his story. But like the wedding guest who listened to the mariner’s tale, those who were lucky enough to catch Berkoff’s two-night season will have come away enriched by the experience. [More] 
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Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart is a classic gothic short story which has thrilled and terrified readers since the 19th century by placing them in the role of confidant to a homicidal maniac. What makes it all the more chilling is that the murderer’s confession is actually a fervent assertion of his own sanity. His warped rationale is that no madman could have the skill or concentration to plan and enact the killing of the Old Man with the ‘vulture eye’.

While we recognize the paradox of a man who wants to prove he is sane by showing us the depths of his pathological obsession, what makes us shudder is that the killer trusts us. He knows we will believe him. He knows we will understand.

In his adaptation, which forms the first half of his One Man, Steven Berkoff seeks to make the killer’s mind-state manifest on stage. In a single hard spotlight he appears in three-piece suit and tails, an apparition in ghostly white pancake. From his first movement it is clear we are in another world; surreal, distorted, exaggerated, dreamlike.  

He strides forward, beneath the high prosc-arch of the Opera House, his limbs jerky, his face twisted in a grimace that may once have been a smile The effect is of a paper-thin shell of humanity, just barely containing a deeply disturbed spirit. Berkoff’s mime is mesmeric with not a muscle twitch is wasted or uncontrolled. His rhythms of movement and speech are unnatural and grotesque.

Through Berkoff’s looking-glass, the word ‘gradually’ has 9 syllables, each a different pitch, and a check of the watch is a compulsive tic. When he insists that “what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses” we realise that this is what Berkoff has done for us – heightened our senses by exaggerating and distorting his body.

Yet there is humour here. As he tells his tale, we become engaged and laugh with affection at the childlike excitement with which the killer goes about his work, and the perverse pride he takes in his thoroughness. Berkoff gleefully places an extended Grand Guignol-esque comic dismemberment within a Poe comma, and has the audience squirming in their seats with delight. 

Very occasionally Berkoff seems in danger of self-indulgence; a virtuoso displaying his craft. Even then, the craft is pretty stunning in and of itself, and the narrative drives him on. He seems acutely aware of the house (not least because of the two cellphones which ring and the latecomer who is inexplicably shown to her seat in the front row rather than sitting quickly and quietly at the back), and revels in triggering reactions.

My only real gripe with the piece is that the dynamic, the energy seems to plateau towards the end, and the crescendo finish Berkoff is aiming for is less of a peak than it wants to be. The “low, dull, quick sound” of the heart itself is sublimely established, but that rhythm isn’t used to drive the momentum through to the end as I expected it would. 

The second half is the monologue Dog.

From the moment Berkoff bounds on to the stage to the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the U.K. (note to The Opera House: possibly time for a new sound system – that didn’t have anything like the audio kick it should have), it’s clear this is him playing his ‘hit’. The audience erupts with a cheer of recognition – they sense this is going to be Classic Berkoff: putting the cock into Cockney. 

The energy here is markedly different to the first half. Physically, the commitment and skill is still there but given a much looser, freer rein, and vocally his palette is narrower and rougher. I have an overwhelming impression of Ralph Steadman’s cartoons made flesh, as Berkoff roars, spits and gurns his way around the now fully lit Opera House stage.

The story is virtually non-existent. It’s a character portrait of an aggressive, hard-drinking, loud-mouthed lout, and his dog, Roy. Roy is the main character’s familiar, his daemon in the Phillip Pullman sense. He’s a distillation of his owner’s personality into basic urges – not that his owner is a great deal further up the evolutionary ladder! Berkoff’s portrayal of the British bulldog Roy is surprisingly charming. For all the violence and aggression in this slavering, foul-mouthed mutt, he has a recognisably canine innocence, and the audience warms to him.

I have to admit to a little cringe at the sight of a man of seventy – albeit a remarkably fit and vital seventy – leaping about the stage as a football hooligan. It seemed a bit like something he was doing because he felt the audience expected it – like the Stones playing Satisfaction as an encore. He hit all the right notes; swearing, racism, rhyming slang; and the audience responded, their expectations met. Conversely, when Berkoff attempted a bit of call-and-response, it took a bit for the reticent Kiwis to warm up. It began to feel a bit like a stand-up routine.

But his energy is relentless, and you can’t help but be swept up. By the time Berkoff hits his party piece – a bravura bit of mime where the absurdity curve is ridden to a place that only mime, and possibly only Steven Berkoff, can go – we’re helpless. It’s, as he says, ‘a joyous expression of life’. Joy that deserves expression, even when the life in question is a squalid, small-minded, “fuckin’ ‘orrible” one.  It’s that joy that Berkoff insists is our common humanity.

All in all, One Man is a well-named show. One man using the tools of his body and voice to work with the imagination of a crowd. Steven Berkoff is unquestionably a master performer, and I felt privileged to see him work. As a night’s entertainment, One Man offers a great deal. The Tell-tale Heart is the meat, asking the questions and pushing the boat out artistically; Dog is dessert, a riotous, carnal, feral celebration that leaves you grinning and exhausted.

It’s a shame the NZ leg of his tour is so short, but if you have the chance, don’t dare miss it.

[For Aaron’s interview with Steven Berkoff, click here.]
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Even though he’s in his early seventies, Steven Berkoff is still the bovver boy of English theatre: he’s a powerful performer, broad, and loud, but he’s an actor whose style is so compellingly out-of-tune with the refined naturalism we see most of the time on our screens and stages that he is a thrilling presence, particularly on stage.

Like Daniel Day-Lewis and Anthony Hopkins, Steven Berkoff dominates stage and screen with a full-throated ease, mesmerizing eyes and a powerful physical presence that combine to spell danger.

In his solo show One Man he presents two short pieces: his adaptation and anglicisation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart and Dog, his own story about a football hooligan and his dog called Roy.

In both playlets he takes us back to the basics of theatre: telling entertaining stories relying only on our imaginations and his own vocal skills, his miming, his skilful timing, which all add up to make him a modern Ancient Mariner holding an audience in his power.

The overheated prose of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart becomes a gleeful story of murder and madness in which the miming of the dismembering of the old man’s body that was accompanied by his own sound effects had the audience cringing and laughing in horror.

It also laughed and cringed at Dog in which Berkoff populates London’s East End with snapshots of groups of Pakistanis and Irish wandering the streets, and drinkers in pubs and of course the lager lout whose long-suffering Roy creates mayhem at a football match.

In The Tell-Tale Heart he’s very much a modern version of an early 19th century melodrama actor; in Dog he’s a satirist skewering his victim in all his brutish nastiness with an outlandish portrait that is both horrific and appallingly funny.

He’s here for only one more performance. It would be a pity to miss him but you may need a strong stomach.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title at the top of this review. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.  

Like Daniel Day-Lewis and Anthony Hopkins, Steven Berkoff dominates stage and screen with a full-throated ease, mesmerizing eyes and a powerful physical presence that combine to spell danger.

In his solo show One Man he presents two short pieces: his adaptation and anglicisation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart and Dog, his own story about a football hooligan and his dog called Roy.

In both playlets he takes us back to the basics of theatre: telling entertaining stories relying only on our imaginations and his own vocal skills, his miming, his skilful timing, which all add up to make him a modern Ancient Mariner holding an audience in his power.

The overheated prose of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart becomes a gleeful story of murder and madness in which the miming of the dismembering of the old man’s body that was accompanied by his own sound effects had the audience cringing and laughing in horror.

It also laughed and cringed at Dog in which Berkoff populates London’s East End with snapshots of groups of Pakistanis and Irish wandering the streets, and drinkers in pubs and of course the lager lout whose long-suffering Roy creates mayhem at a football match.

In The Tell-Tale Heart he’s very much a modern version of an early 19th century melodrama actor; in Dog he’s a satirist skewering his victim in all his brutish nastiness with an outlandish portrait that is both horrific and appallingly funny.

He’s here for only one more performance. It would be a pity to miss him but you may need a strong stomach.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title at the top of this review. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.  

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer