Berkoff/East- Week 1

Monday

Steven Berkoff 

Steven Berkoff is an acclaimed British actor, playwright, author, and director, who continues to challenge theatre with his stunning performances, both on stage and on screen. His career officially kicked off, after studying the craft in London and Paris, when he joined several repertory companies and he then formed the London Theatre Group in 1968. He then appeared in many unaccredited roles in British cinema since 1959, but only started to be noticed after performing in films such as A Clockwork Orange (1971).



Infamous for his roles as 'the villain' in many films, Berkoff himself is an interesting character. In 1980, Berkoff played Hamlet in  London's Roundhouse; when a critic, Nicholas de Jongh, gave Hamlet a bad review, Berkoff threatened Jongh. Claiming he was "only acting", Berkoff started to gain publicity for his outspoken and provocative behaviour, both on and off the stage.



Explanation video with his techniques and what we did in the lesson today:

I think that the warm ups that we did in this lesson prepared us for Berkoff and got us used to the extremities of his style. I think that the usage of severe facial expressions and body language is an excellent way to portray emotion because the audience doesn't have to look for any implications of feelings, but rather, they are in plain sight. Additionally, I like that Berkoff's style is so heavily reliant on language and what is being said for stage directions. It's almost surreal when something can be said and immediately acted upon through physical theatre. 

In the future these are all things I must focus on: 

• extreme facial expressions
• staccato rhythm in pace
• movement motivated by language 

Wednesday

Today in our lesson, we were assigned an extract from the play East by Steven Berkoff. East is a 1975 verse play about growing up and dealing with the rites of passage in London's East End. The first time it was ever preformed was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1975.

Berkoff, in East, forged a mashup of Shakespearean vocabulary and language, with the harsh cockney accent and slang. This, in my opinion, creates a rhythms of language that is not only obscene and violent in nature, but has undertones of beauty. In East, and his other plays, Berkoff urges the language to movement and mime. Whilst many would say, "actions speak louder than words", Berkoff encourages actions to enforce spoken word, rather than replace it -as would be common in naturalistic drama.

When introducing us to the Berkoff style a bit more, we were told to look at this performance done by some members of N2C theatre group of West:

West N2C Theatre

We took some inspiration from this group when devising our own movements and defining the Berkoff style. I think that the biggest challenge that I've had to overcome in this lesson is distinguishing between John Godber's (another theatre practitioner) style and Berkoff's, because they are quite similar. I think that the differences have to do entirely again, with language, and spoken word being the motivation for the actions in Berkoff's style. Whereas in Godber's style, actions can often "motivate" words or be entirely literal actions rather than metaphorical ones.

We chose this bit of the extract from East because we thought that it seemed intriguing from a language standpoint. When reading the extract out, we were already thinking of movements we could attach to the text. Since we have never preformed Berkoff before, it will be good to experiment with a piece that motivates the physical aspects of this extract easily.

Here is a video of what we came up with today in lesson:

East (Berkoff) Work

Some things that I think we need to change/work on are:

• Having a staccato rhythm to our voices; may be easier once we've learnt our lines completely 
• Cockney accents, we've been told to try and do these...
• Not all of our movements are as defined as they could be (they need to have clear beginnings and ends), this may change however after we have learnt our lines (because our scripts won't be inhibiting us) -they are slightly too fluid at the moment.
• Bigger facial expressions; for instance, when we say "the crunch of boot on...testicle", on "testicle", we could define the word more by making an over the top facial expression to  go with it 

Here are some pictures of the extract we chose:

All the highlighted bits of this extract from East are my lines, or lines that I share with other people. The X's show where I was going to say those lines but they were given to other people in my group or we cut the line out.