Berkoff, Steven (1937-…), a British playwright, actor, and director, won fame as an unconventional theater artist. In 1968, Berkoff formed his own company, the London Theatre Group. It proved to be one of the most original theater companies in the United Kingdom, using mime, gymnastics, and speech and vocal techniques to develop a new, integrated means of theatrical communication.
As a theater director, Berkoff directed several of his own radical reworkings of classic stories. He adapted the Czech writer Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1969), in which he played the young man suddenly transformed into an insect, and the American author Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (1974). Berkoff also adapted the Kafka stories In the Penal Colony and The Trial for the stage in 1968. The adaptations are noted for their nightmarish quality and strong political viewpoints.
Berkoff’s own plays, which he has both directed and acted in, include East (1975), Greek (1980), West (1980), Sing the Belgrano! (1986), Kvetch (1986), and Acapulco (1986). East portrays life in London’s East End, using blank verse. Greek reinterprets the story of King Oedipus from a feminist viewpoint, and West takes a fresh look at the ancient Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf to attack the British class system. Berkoff has made many screen appearances as a villain in such motion pictures as the James Bond film Octopussy (1983), the action film Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and the thriller Fair Game (1995). He wrote a memoir, Free Association (1996).
Berkoff was born on Aug. 3, 1937, in London. In 1956, took an acting course at the City Literary Institute in London. He studied at the Webber Douglas Academy in 1958 and 1959 and at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, a mime school in Paris, in 1965. This training gave him a thorough knowledge of every aspect of stagecraft. He understudied roles and stage-managed productions while working in repertory theater in England and Scotland.
