THE scene is the Sahara
desert. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Berkoff are on location, filming a
movie called Legionnaire. The shoot is going painfully slowly. There is time to
kill. But Berkoff has a solution. "In a trailer you go mad," he says
today. "You read books, you read the papers, you roll up cigarettes. What
is better to do in a trailer than write? I wrote two works over two or three
weeks – and I suddenly got involved with Oedipus."
It wasn't the first time
Berkoff had focused on the Sophocles tragedy. His 1979 play Greek relocated the
myth to the modern-day East End of London. Here the story of the king who
inadvertently murders his dad and marries his mum was told in terms of
waitresses in a decaying Britain and a hero called Eddy. Like his debut play
East, Greek became a mainstay of student theatre groups in Edinburgh and helped
secure Berkoff's place as an unofficial Fringe figurehead. Now he has brought
his new, more faithful, version of Oedipus published in 2000, to the stage for
the first time.
Having directed it in
Liverpool and Nottingham earlier this year, he is joining the cast himself to
play Creon on the Fringe. Simon Merrells – last seen in Edinburgh in Berkoff's
adaptation of On the Waterfront – reprises the central role of the arrogant
king and is joined by Anita Dobson as Jocasta, his wife and mother. Performed
around a long table, with imagery drawn from renaissance painting, the
production is a prime example of ensemble playing – heightened, intense and
visceral.
"My theatre is
actor-led," says Berkoff, 73, sitting in his East End studio flat
overlooking the Thames. "In a Greek play, you have the ensemble who are
the storytellers and the chorus who reflect the events. I see the ensemble as
the backbone of the company, therefore they must have absolute control and
command over the material and over the play. They are a dynamic reflection of
the events, telling the story and articulating the doubts of the people. The
leading actors are enhanced by this meteor tail of the ensemble. For that they
must be ambitious, versatile and physically dextrous."
To return to the Greeks,
he says, is something audiences have an appetite for, but it is an appetite
rarely satisfied. "The Greeks do speak to us very profoundly," he
says. "It's unfortunate that we don't see enough of them – or, when we do
see them, they're not put on in a way that expresses the underlying depth of
humanity."
It makes perfect sense
that filling the wall opposite him should be a collection of nine Peter Howson
originals. The Glasgow artist, with his bold, masculine directness, finds an
ideal match in Berkoff's muscular theatre. "All my savings go into Peter
Howson," says Berkoff, who played Bond villain General Orlov in Octopussy.
"There's an intensity, a compassion, a strong feeling, an identification
with the common man and also the poetic description of labour. That's something
you don't get very much of in the present art world."
Today Berkoff, dressed
in black tracksuit and rolling a cigarette, is in benign spirits – breaking off
only to rant about the bourgeoisification of his beloved East End – but whether
as an actor, director or writer, he is a tough-talking artist who despises
mediocrity. Far from the prim Greek tragedies of the classroom, his version of
Oedipus is an abrasive play that talks of "new-born brats",
"black bile" and "sceptic poison". "You've got to make
it real, give it substance, give it gravity, give it some kind of
grittiness," he says. "Most Greek plays are dull as dishwater.
They're so boring: 'Oh! Great Zeus, mighty king – la, la, la!'"
He demands a similar
kind of forcefulness of his actors and knows exactly what he's looking for:
"I can just see the rhythm of their body language, the swiftness of
response, the way they read, good timbre in their voices."
As a director, he has no qualms about cutting his own script when he needs to, but he also enthuses about it as if someone else had written it. "The text flows, it has a drive," he says. "It's rhythmic, because I'm a very rhythmic person – I've studied dance, I love music – so it's great to work on this text. It's not so much about muscularity as the jazz of text. It was the same in the blues, in black music, when the people took hold of music and made it their own. When the working man started making music, it was the sound of the people that was exciting. You have to make theatre as dynamic, thrilling, awesome as possible. I want the audience to see something they have never before seen."
WHERE & WHEN
OEDIPUS
Pleasance Courtyard
Aug 3–29 August (not 9,
10, 17 or 24), 1.20pm
£10–£17.50, 0131 556 6550
© Mark Fisher 2011
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