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Click on the images below for links to the plays and reviews
 
 
Massage

You can listen to Steven being interviewed on Massage.

 

click here for link Massage (link is no longer free)
Joh
n Peter, 24 Aug 1977

This is one of Berkoff's funniest, filthiest and most vitriolic pieces. His satanic majesty, at 60, is in lissom and frisky middle age. He plays a hostess in a massage parlour, grotesquely enticing in well-moulded dress and high heels, regaling you with detailed descriptions of her skills. She is the English lower-class man's dirty postcard made flesh...

In private life, she is Mum, sharing a ghastly lower-middle-class home with Dad (Barry Philips, a marvellous comedy act); and every now and again their dialogue flashes with a thick-witted, deadpan viciousness that would be quite at home in one of Pinter's inspired revue sketches.
 

click for link Messiah
Charles Spenser, 4 Dec 2003

Messiah is yet another stinker from his ever-prolific pen and a work in which blasphemy is eclipsed only by banality.
 

click for link Messiah
James Inverne, Playbill, 2 Dec 2003

Combining lyricism and raw physicality.
 

click here for link Metamorphosis

Mikhail Baryshnikov at the Barrymore Theatre NYC. Photo by Martha Swope.

Steven Berkoff Metamorphosis

click here for link Metamorphosis
David Anthony Fox, Jun 2000

In Berkoff’s play, the family assumes greater centrality than in the original. But that too is faithful to Kafka’s theme, for Metamorphosis is also a satire on middle-class values. The Samsa family, accustomed to mundane creature comforts provided by their son, now have not only lost a breadwinner, they’ve gained an obscene, unpresentable pet. What are they to do?
 

Metamorphosis Metamorphosis

With eight actors, some scaffolding and three stools, Berkoff recreates a nightmare world of alienation, a grotesque pantomime in which the audience witness the dehumanisation and eventual destruction of Gregor Samsa, heroically struggling to the last, against greed, indifference and selfishness.
 

click here for link Metamorphosis (link is down)
Sheffield, 2000

The characters of Metamorphosis bear a close comparison to Kafka´s own family.
 

click here for link Metamorphosis (link is down)
Richard Gist, 14 Oct 1998

Ayun Fedorcha's lighting provides precise pools where characters step in to deliver themselves or, at times, carefully skirt or circle around. At one ingenious point in the early part of the production a stage hand comes out with a hand-held flood light to cast moving shadows of Gregor as insect on the rear wall.

Photo of Delia Taylor as Gregor Samsa by Jim Tetro.
 

click here for link One Man (Dog, The Tell-tale Heart, Actor)

He leans heavily on mime, but he is a whirlwind of various techniques; call him a One Man band. It’s impressive that he can play the equivalent of so many instruments, and he certainly makes you listen and watch. Yet, for all of his skill, you are likely to feel more awestruck than moved.

 

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