Arts Entertainment

A Taste For Blood

Jewish British actor portrays Shakespeare's most unsavory
characters at Ann Arbor Summer Festival.

AUDREY BECKER
Special to the Jewish News

Steven Berko ff
`American
audiences tend to
be alert and come
to the theater with
openness and
curiosity"

2002

68

ctor, writer and director
Steven Berkoff is known for
playing the bad guys.
Born in Stepney,
London, Berkoff was a member of a
series of repertory companies and in
1968 formed the London Theatre
Group. Not.much later he began writ-
ing his own plays, the first of which
was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe
Festival in 1975.
In the intervening years he has writ-
ten and directed numerous theatrical
works, published several books, exhibit-
ed photographs and appeared in count-
less plays, films and television series.
To American audiences he is best rec-
ognized as the crooked art dealer in the
first Beverly Hills Cop film, and he has
been cast as the "heavy" in a number of
other films and television programs.
His fascination with the dark side of
the human psyche has led him to
develop a one-man show focusing on
Shakespeare's bad guys.
Shakespeare's Villains: A Masterclass in
Evil will be performed June 26 at the
Power Center as part of the Ann .
Arbor Summer Festival. In this
dynamic masterclass, Berkoff dispenses
with props and sets in order to put the
spotlight on the Bard's depiction of
malevolence.
The Jewish News recently spoke with
Steven Berkoff about this current pro-
duction, his ideas about Shakespearean
performance and his Jewish back-
ground.

JN: Can you tell us about how you
developed the idea for this show?
What drew you to the "villains"
specifically?
SB: I was always interested in how to
play Shakespeare. At the same time, I
knew that to do Shakespeare success-
fully, you had to surround yourself

with a group of actors to play the play.
And yet I didn't want to feel that I
had to always do a whole production
to play Shakespeare any more than
opera singers when they do an
evening's concert have to do the whole
opera.
I wanted to do these "arias" much as
Pavarotti or Domingo would do it: by
selecting speeches. So I can have the
pleasure of playing Shakespeare,
demonstrating different characters and
different styles of acting.
Then I started to look for the pieces
that would suit me and also be inter-
esting to an audience. As I started
selecting them, I found I was more
drawn toward what they call the "vil-
lains" of Shakespeare because they have
a complexity. And then I thought,
"Let's give the evening a theme."

IN: Do you have a favorite
Shakespeare villain? Or one that you
think is the most intriguing or com-
plex?
SB: I like Macbeth because he starts
off reluctant. And he articulates him-
self so extraordinarily well. There's
such a passion and such a fascinating
dynamism to him. He's not as two-
dimensional as Iago or Richard III. He
has fear and concern. I think that
gives him a greater variety of feelings.
And there's a lot of poetry in his
lines. Fascinating speeches: "...
Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecat's
off'rings, and wither'd Murther, /
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, /
Whose howl's his watch."
They're introductions to murder.
But never was murder prepared for
with such poetic imagery!

JN: You include Hamlet in
Shakespeare's Villains. Why is he in
that category?
SB: I put Hamlet in there because I
discovered that Hamlet has a streak of
villainy in him. After he kills Polonius,

