I Am Hamlet by Steven Berkoff

by Steven Berkoff

What goes through a man’s mind when he is playing Hamlet? How does Shakespeare’s best-known play actually work, from the inside? Steven Berkoff is an actor, playwright, and director with an extraordinary talent for conveying powerful ideas and emotions. His production of Hamlet, in which he took the title role, began in Edinburgh in 1979, went on to the Round House in London, and toured throughout Europe for the next two years. The company completed its final performance as guests of Jean-Louis Barrault at his Rond Point Theater, where the audience gave the production a tempestuous ovation. During the tour Berkoff kept a journal and recorded the workings of the play from the director/actor’s point of view.

On the basis of that diary Berkoff has created an intensely personal analysis of the play with a line-by-line examination of the text and the way he approached it in his production. His detailed observations show how his imagination covers a wide range of human experience—from love and death to the nature of marriage and the messianic fervor of Hamlet. I Am Hamlet not only reveals the mind of a fascinating actor and director at work, it is also a singular encounter with a part that “touches the complete alphabet of human experience” and that every actor feels he is born to play.

Genres: Theatre

Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Steven Berkoff is an English actor, writer and director.Best known for his performance as General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy, he is typically cast in villanous roles, such as Lt. Col Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II, Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop, and Adolf Hitler in epic mini-series War and Remembrance.

His earliest plays are adaptations of works by Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1969); In the Penal Colony (1969); and The Trial (1971); these complex psychological plays are said to be nightmarish and to create a disturbing sense of alienation in their audiences. In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote a series of verse plays including: East (1975); Greek (1980); Decadence (1981); West (1983); Sink the Belgrano! (1986); Massage (1997); Sturm und Drang; and The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001). East, Greek and West were punk-inspired works about working class London youth based on Oedipus and Beowulf respectively.

Berkoff employs a style of heightened physical theatre known as "total theatre". Drama critic Aleks Sierz describes his Berkoff's dramatic style as "in yer face": "the language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each another, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent. At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen, and want all their friends to see it too. It is the kind of theatre that inspires us to use superlatives, whether in praise or condemnation."

According to Annette Pankratz, in her 2005 Modern Drama review of Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance, by Robert Cross, "Steven Berkoff is one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain and – due to his self-fashioning as a bad boy of British theatre and the ensuing attention of the media – a phenomenon in his own right."

"I'm scared of Steven Berkoff" is a line in the lyrics of "I'm Scared" (1992), by Queen's guitarist Brian May, released on his first solo album Back to the Light (1993). Brian May has declared himself as a great admirer of Berkoff.

The Berkoff Performing Arts Centre was named for him at Alton College, in North East Hampshire on 20 June 2008.

Reviews

[Michael Lloyd-Billington · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rare thing, indeed, and definitely a work that belongs in your library if you are a fan of Shakespeare or a serious actor or both. Steven Berkoff is a gifted actor who also has the talents necessary to distill and convey in a lucid and powerful fashion the internal process involved in taking on what is unquestionably one of the most complex and demanding roles in the dramatic canon. Far more insightful than many works written by "noted" Shakespeare scholars, this is a work no "Hamlet" enthusiast should be without....

[David]

Interesting, though, like all Berkoff's work, strongly influenced by his own personality.