Iconoclastic actor and director Steven Berkoff is in the news again. Let's face it, he has never been shy of standing up for his opinions in front of journalists (and nothing wrong with that), and now the Los Angeles Times carries his insistence that he quit the forthcoming (now delayed) production of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. The show was to have opened this month at the Geffen Playhouse, also starring Tim Roth, but Berkoff, in the crucial role of the sinister Goldstein, has left, and the opening has been put back. William Friedkin, the show's director, says he was all but fired.
Berkoff, who is complimentary to the newspaper about Friedkin's films, which famously include The Exorcist, claims that the pair were friendly in the beginning but that artistic differences heated up until Berkoff, himself, felt the need to leave. Friedkin emails the paper to say that, "he was allowed to leave to preserve his dignity. Had he not resigned, he would have been fired."
Which is as good as saying he was fired, isn't it? But it doesn't really matter. Great actors get fired all the time. Fellow Brit Henry Goodman was fired from The Producers in New York before opening night, and few who know his work can doubt his brilliance. Speaking of, Woody Allen fired the entire cast of Husbands and Wives and started the film again with a new personnel, and nobody thought any the less of his original, distinguished lineup.
But what is undeniably true is this: Hire a truly original actor like Berkoff certainly is (anyone who knows anything of his work knows that he can on occasion push the extremes, that he's a fearless experimenter in the cause of emotional truth, even when it's highly stylised) and, by definition, you won't know what you're going to get. By definition. But you hire them knowing that. So, you have to give them the space to fail. With such actors, usually, even their failures are more interesting and sometimes more instructive than most people's hits. Berkoff has given a lot to the theater and to acting, in some ways he has added to the literature (and I don't just mean through his writing). He deserved his press night.
OK, let's say that Friedkin knew all of that but just couldn't, in all conscience, live with the route his star chose to explore--that he deeply and fundamentally disagreed with Berkoff's view of the character at that stage, and that Berkoff was indeed given his marching orders. You let the guy go. Preserve his dignity, as Friedkin said. But don't then tell everyone that that's what you did. Because you know what happens then? Dignity is lost on both sides. And on Friedkins, perhaps a little bit of grace.
