One Man, Steven Berkoff, Riverside Studios
Catch it. Tell Tale Heart and Dog shows off Steven Berkoff’s consummate skill. He offers a window on vaudeville, clowning, music-hall as well as casting light on some uncomfortable human characteristics which can make you squirm.
The first, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, is a madman’s tale of murder, obsession. The recreation of the old man’s room and his subsequent dismemberment is wonderfully grotesque, brought off with a few choice movement sequences. Berkoff’s graceful hands have the precision of a surgeon as he delineates his settings, with the swift execution of a Venus fly-trap. As the butler he teases out the text, beats, as he plays the audience as willing, and sometimes, uncomfortable accomplices in his tale.
The second creation Dog is equally grotesque but here Berkoff steps up a gear, if this is at all possible, by characterising both the hooligan dog owner and his pooch, Roy. Much of the humour is derived from Berkoff’s facial expressions which cross and re-cross from one to the other and in his rapid change in physicality. Dog is ‘a day in the life of’ as opposed to Poe’s rounded, macabre tale. In both pieces you know you are in the presence of a master-craftsman: vibrant, highly theatrical, often chilling in its grotesquerie, as Berkoff climbs and re-climbs stairs, or in a moment of fierce bonding, gives the dog a kiss.
Both pieces are accompanied by his own percussive man-made sounds: footsteps, the lopping of limbs or driving his transit van and swilling back pints of lager. Yet the introduction to Dog by the Sex Pistols is a forceful reminder that the bad boy of the theatre is still around to kick ass. Go and see him and learn what theatre is really about.
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