Biblical Tales

Steven Berkoff directs a World Premiere of Biblical Tales at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, London for a four-week season opening 3 August 2010.

Steven Berkoff has adapted four of the most cherished Old Testament biblical stories and given them a 21st Century twist. We meet Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath and Moses and Pharoah in guises we would never have believed possible. Thought provoking, entertaining and controversial - this is an evening of pure Berkovian style and humour.

Steven Berkoff says:

"The Old Testament myths are so mysterious and compelling that they lend themselves to all sorts of interpretations. Working on my adaptations it became obvious how relevant they are to our attitudes and values in modern times. It was the recent "Gaza " war and the appalling flack that Israel received that prompted me to investigate ancient Jewish values".
 

The site now includes a number of  unpublished poems.

Some months ago an English journalist went to Tanzania and gratuitously killed a baboon, for no other reason than satisfying his morbid curiosity.  A Beast is Steven Berkoff's response.

Uprising is a Memorial to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on the Sixtieth Anniversary, April 19th, 1943.

Click here for these and other poems.

More unpublished work will appear soon.

You Remind Me of Marilyn Monroe is the latest book of poetry by Steven Berkoff.

"Most of all in the night, suddenly feeling
desperately alone I awoke, forgetting for the
moment as I surface through the clouds of a
dream. Forgetting that my mate lay next to me,
my mate sleeping beside me... I turned to face
her suddenly, and in that one desperate second of
loneliness I turn to hold her fast but firm in my arms as if a
thousand years away and in that one desperate
second I rushed to seize her as if I had returned
home from a desperate voyage."

(from The Kiss)

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"...there is something fascinating about performing an Elizabethan play within the scrapers of Manhattan and the still rotting slums of the Lower East Side, between the steaming breath oozing out from the cracked pipes and the brutality of modern New York speak.  New York became the background and the energy which charged me each day for my work and fed my inspiration.  Gradually the play took form and I was proud of it and of the opportunity to revel what I might be able to achieve with the Bard. I was served by a  first-rate company who worked incredibly hard and achieved much more than a modicum of success.  the rest is here within...".

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Steven Berkoff has had an obsession with food commencing with his earliest childhood memories at his mother’s table and developed through his travels around the world as an actor out on tour. Away from the comforts of family and home cooking, food took on the role of companion and lover.

From anonymous fast food counters, East End cafés and New York diners, through falafels in Tel Aviv to sushi in Tokyo and on, Berkoff’s personal collection of anecdotal stories, documented with photographs, reveal the transforming nature of food and its significance emotionally and culturally, in his own inimitable style.

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