Shortly after that just as quickly overnight my skin went Pale and drawn, she alerts you to how the character's clich?clutchings at optimism tend to be curiously qualified "This will have been another happy day! [Pause] After all. In 1976, Peter Hall inaugurated the National Theatre's new building on the South Bank with an acclaimed production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days , starring Peggy Ashcroft. This is an evening that reverberates with theatrical memories. For this expert, loving re-examination, he has cast Felicity Kendal as Winnie, who is buried up to her waist in the first act and up to her neck in the second.With a striking set by his daughter Lucy, Hall reinvigorates the shock value of that now classic metaphor for life as a process of gradual entombment. But in her moving performance, Kendal lets you hear the gasping panic under Winnie's bright protestations. We are presented with a more intrusive, aerial perspective on Winnie than normal.She juts out from the centre of a tilted-up spiral of earth that looks like the electric ring of a Baby Belling as magnified and reimagined by the Surrealist movement.Kendal is a very English actress, but I'm delighted to report that here she affects (and very convincingly, too) the Irish accent written into the rhythms of Winnie's near-monologue.Some interpreters keep us guessing about the level of the heroine's self-deception. It is a play directly from my heart and gut, and I think it will reverberate with people, especially in the times we are going through. We need a belief in something beyond our own greedy selves."Old Vic, London SE1 (0870 060 6628); previews from 25 November. The cast also includes John Coyne as John the Baptist, Brendan Hughes as Judas, Michael Jenn as Pontius Pilate and Ray Sawyer as Caiphus.Berkoff, of course, is the Great Seducer, who "appeals to the audience's own sense of what is Satanic in them. He found the Old Vic had a space and we did it independently, which is usually what I do."Having finally found a suitable venue, Messiah's prospects look healthy. Vidal Sassoon, an old friend of Berkoff's, is helping to produce, and Greg Hicks, who was last seen at the Old Vic in the summer as Coriolanus, takes the part of Christ. In the past few years, I was doing a lot on the fringe again and doing lots of crappy independent movies, but our company manager, Andrew Taylor, believed in Messiah so much that he fought for it with the ardour of a real disciple He said this must be seen.
"To get interest from the major institutions is like climbing up a mountain with no shoes on," he says.Despite receiving good reviews after its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival three years ago, and then touring Europe, there was still no response to Messiah from the major theatres "I had to leave it for a while," says Berkoff. He may be one of the enduring stars of British theatre and have enjoyed a high-profile film sideline, but Berkoff admits it was difficult finding a theatre to put on his play. But when you are performing, you start thinking about you all the time. It becomes a conflict."There were, Berkoff admits, commercial considerations that led to his undertaking the role of Satan. I wanted to step outside it, because when you are directing, all your thoughts are for others and your own self is unimportant; in that respect, you are, in a way, expressed through the others. He does so - surprisingly, with reluctance - in Messiah: Scenes from a Crucifixion, which opens at the Old Vic and dramatises the last weeks of Christ's life on Earth. As the writer and director of Messiah, Berkoff offers up the idea not only that Christ may have planned his own death and resurrection, rather than having been a victim of Rome, as the Bible would have us believe, but also that the Twelve Disciples cleaved to him because they were starstruck, and not for any more profound reason."But I didn't think Satan was the part for me," says Berkoff "That's why I chose not to play it in the first place. Given the air of danger Steven Berkoff brings to his roles - not to mention the sulphurous air of many of the characters he has played on stage and screen - one might think the actor was born to play the ultimate villain, Satan. Is it any wonder that his work is being rediscovered in an America in which Christian evangelism is resurgent, and polls show that a majority believe in angels and demons?. Perhaps the generation that could understand Potter, and the complex, contradictory attitudes towards sex caused by his faith, is passing into history - or being born elsewhere. Shortly after that, just as quickly, overnight, my skin went. And suddenly I realised: it was like one of the plagues of Egypt."It is hard for those of us who live in a culture saturated with porn, a culture in which most of us do not know even the most basic Bible stories, to understand scripts that are about angels, devils, psalms and violent sexual repression. |
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