After a review I wrote a few years ago,
Steven Berkoff informed me that I was banned, but since his letter
never specified by whom or from what, I’ve continued to go to his
shows. This is partly because, for all that he can get up one’s nose
like a little finger, he can still turn out some fine work. This stage
production of Budd Schulberg’s classic 1954 screenplay is a case in
point.
The students in the audience at the performance I saw may have laughed
at the portentous slow-motion work that is a Berkoff hallmark,
especially in scenes of violence, but they were gradually won over.
Whether in Sophocles, Schulberg or his own scripts, and be it physical
or verbal, he knows the power of a choric sequence. Simon Merrells may
have trouble synchronising with such ensemble physical moments, but his
conviction in the central role of Terry Malloy makes his out-of-sync
miming a trivial matter. It is no small feat to stop an audience
thinking about Marlon Brando’s performance in the film, but Merrells
does so, particularly in the crucial back-of the-car dialogue with his
union-mobster brother; even the iconic line “I coulda been a contender”
carries hardly any ghostly echoes of the great man. Vincenzo Nicoli
almost matches this intensity in his own great dramatic aria, Father
Barry’s impromptu sermon over a dead docker exhorting his colleagues to
testify about the organised corruption on the piers. If I describe him
as “Father Danny Aiello”, you’ll get the picture. As Terry’s inamorata
and the sister of another murdered witness, Coral Beed overcomes her
early shrillness to give him a plausible reason to do the right thing.
And as local union boss Johnny Friendly – clearly the role that
director Berkoff would have liked to play himself – Sam Douglas is a
great, hulking menace, able to lift ex-boxer Terry bodily and swing him
about, and clad (a terrific detail, this) in old-fashioned high-waisted
trousers.
A bland, rather pointless New-York-skyline set design and a weak
original score (contrasting with smart use of sourced music of the
period, as when a slo-mo beating-up takes place to “I Put A Spell On
You”) likewise fail to taint the sheer power of this production, which
is palpably driven by a passionate belief in the material. I intend to
carry on defying the ban.
Written for the Financial
Times.