Steven Berkoff has come to town, and I
rejoice. At the Joseph Papp
Public Theater, he’s doing a little one-man show called
Shakespeare’s Villains: A Masterclass in Evil, and one of the
most agreeable aspects of the production is watching him struggle
in vain to stick to the subject and not digress too frequently
into his many other obsessions. Mostly, Berkoff divides his time
between virtuoso rants on the London stage and a little light
supporting-actor work in Hollywood (villains in Bruce Willis
movies, that sort of thing), though such a threadbare
characterization hardly does justice to the man who “almost
single-handedly revitalized a large section of the British
theatre.”

This quotation comes from
the incisive S. Berkoff himself, and was his indignant
response a decade ago to the fact that Fleet Street’s “Best of
the Eighties” round-ups didn’t bother including him. Berkoff was
very hot in the Eighties, though he’s cooled somewhat since then:
the adjective “Berkovian” is not heard as often as it once was
around the precincts of BBC arts shows. Still, he was hurt to be
overlooked. “I feel like those artists in the Third Reich who
were cut out of the history books,” he wrote (though in fairness
Time Out did mention him on their “Shit List” of the
decade). As
he notes in one of his many volumes of memoir, diary,
and reminiscence, “The pioneer always has to suffer.” His
belief in his genius is indestructible, no matter the