Berkoff's poetry emotion at Book Now (From Your Local Guardian)

Berkoff's poetry emotion at Book Now

3:56pm Thursday 19th November 2009

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Steven Berkoff is best known for his work in the theatre as a writer, director and performer.

After bursting onto the London theatre scene with his trio of Kafka adaptations in the late 60s, he has continued producing plays in his own idiosyncratic, highly physical style.

Although he has not always been at one with the critics, 2009 has been a successful year for Berkoff after his stage version of the classic film, On the Waterfront, proved a hit in the West End.

He has also found time to release a volume of poetry, You Remind Me of Marilyn Monroe, and he will be appearing at the Orange Tree this Sunday, as part of the Book Now Festival, to read from the collection.

Berkoff says the poems, concerned with love and sex, were written as he was embarking on a new relationship.

“I started writing them in order to purge myself of my previous relationship,” he explains. “When you are in a relationship that is going a bit odd, you sour yourself with lots negative thoughts, frustrations and bitterness.

“By writing them down, you are able to analyse yourself. In a way the poem becomes a mirror that lets you look at yourself and see your blemishes, flaws, spots and scars.”

The poems are a mixture of declarations of love and downbeat meditations on failed relationships, with lots of humour and the odd bit of graphic sexual imagery thrown in for good measure.

On paper the poems, often long and written in a stream of consciousness style, can make for a tough read but they should come alive in a public setting.

“It is always something that expresses the energy of the poem when it is read to more than one person,” says Berkoff.

“One person reading it in solitary can make for a very meaningful experience but, when you read a poem to a group of people, it can ignite something inside the text that doesn’t have the same effect as reading it privately.

“It is something collective that brings a poem to life so I think collective experience can be more satisfying than a private one.”

As well as his playwrighting, Berkoff has been writing poems for 30 years and has also written a number of books including production journals and his autobiography, Free Association.

He says poetry allows him to express himself very differently to how he does in his playwrighting.

“I have written about things in poems I couldn’t write about in plays as it is too broad a subject,” he says.

“Poems give complete access to an immediate photo. It is like a snapshot that takes the experience and immediately puts it down, enabling you to encapsulate it in an intense way, as you wouldn’t be able to do in a play.”

But is the inspiration for all these different forms of writing born from the same place?

“They all come out of some kind of experience that is in you that doesn’t fade with other experiences,” he says.

“If something begins to gnaw at you, or even excite you, then you want to give it breath and write about it.

“Poems can often be something eating into you that is bitter. That almost seems to me to be the best form because a poem is an intense experience, like high-octane gas or strong alcohol, whereas a play is more like wine – less alcoholic but it gives a broader general feeling which is more accessible in some way.”

He says he has two long poems, about Tony Blair’s regime and the Warsaw ghetto uprising, waiting for a publisher and it is probably a fair assumption that more plays will be in the offing as well.

At 72, whether he is on the wine or the harder stuff, Berkoff’s thirst for writing and performing is showing no signs of abating.

Steven Berkoff, Orange Tree Theatre, November 22, 7pm, £10/£8.50, 020 8940 3633, visit richmond.gov.uk/ book_now_2009

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