Gwen Ansell on Steven Berkoff
GRAHAMSTOWN adores Steven Berkoff (right). Even after he referred to their quaint town as a “dump”, festinos still packed the theatre and gave the man a gushing standing ovation. The media, echoing the festival programme, have proclaimed him this year’s emperor. Problem is, despite the mildewed tailcoat, the Hamletian black suit and the Union Jack T-shirt, he isn’t wearing any clothes.
His show, One Man, at the Rhodes Theatre, presents three dramatic monologues of physical theatre: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale, a portrait of a “resting” actor in Actor, and Dog, the tale of a Thatcher-era bovver-boy and his pitbull terrier.
Certainly, the physical side of what he does is very well done indeed. On a bare stage without props under a stark spot, his face is expressive, his moves fluid, expressive and delicate, his voice symphonic. He plays the audience with a fine sense of comic timing: infuriated (as we all were) by a persistent cougher, he conducted the chorus, mimed the man’s strangulation and turned a nuisance into a laugh.
He milks the audience for further laughs by miming farts, by grabbing at his crotch and by shouting “cunt”, although it’s a moot point whether that’s a plus for his comic technique or a comment on an audience that still thinks rude words are inherently comical.
But are form and style more important than content? In the Poe, he turns the author’s essentially neurasthenic sensibility into broad music hall, with voices and grimaces courtesy of Albert Steptoe. In Actor, his rhyming couplets relay every tired clich we’ve ever heard about the profession: bitching hypocrisy, lecherous eye, treacherous agent. (At the same time Berkoff was performing, a group of Gauteng streetkid actors at the festival were being robbed of everything they owned: there are different actors with different problems.) In Dog, the point that football hooligans are little better than beasts is so obvious it’s made in the first three minutes. The first time the dog answers back with, “Shut up or I’ll bite your fucking head off!” it’s funny. That moment recurs rather too often to sustain the joke.
The various varieties of raving nutter eventually blur together, so that there isn’t much difference between Vincent Price manically hacking up his old lodger and the skinhead wildly putting the boot in.
The whole performance, too, is dated in its references, many of them to a Thatcherite England that doesn’t even exist in England anymore, and in its style. The dramatic, and more particularly the comic, monologue were a staple of music hall and postwar British radio broadcasts – remember Al Reid and Joyce Grenfell? – and the irreverent thought came to me that if you cut the scatology, Dog would have done very well on Workers’ Playtime.
So why does Grahamstown wet its collective knickers over a production that says nothing about either theatre or society in South Africa in the 1990s?
And would the British Arts Council – had it existed then – have given a travelling grant to Al Reid?
— One Man shows at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from July 15 to July 19