Author Description

Steven Berkoff has been variously described as exciting, controversial, thrilling, egocentric, electric, dynamic and difficult. A gifted playwright, a charismatic stage performer, an inventive director and a screen actor - who is Steven Berkoff? Of Russian extraction, born in the East End and schooled in Hackney, he has become one of the foremost innovators in British theatre since bursting upon the scene with Metamorphosis in 1969. A childhood spent ranging freely between London and New York, teenage years spent going 'up West', working as a waiter on a cruise ship, an unhappy stint as a salesman in London, Iceland and Germany (gambling at the same tables in Wiesbaden as Dostoievsky), then on to drama school, a course of mime with Jaques Le Coq in Paris and early days in weekly rep in the early sixties, this first collection of autobiographical writings from Steven Berkoff shows how he eschewed the establishment and broke new ground, how he utilised his life experiences theatrically and developed his radical use of the English language for his plays East, West and Greek, and his adaptations of Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe.