Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The career and work of the British playwright and actor Steven Berkoff (born 1937) can be seen as a wide-ranging and multimedia project concerned primarily with Berkoff’s own self-construction and self-projection. As writer, dramatist, actor and autobiographer, Berkoff has conspicuously played with multiple and shifting identities in his oeuvre: the Jacques Lecoq-trained physical actor, the Cockney tough guy, the Kafka interpreter, the victimized Jew, the Freudian self-analyst. As such, his work offers a fascinating insight into the performative aspects of identity formation and the constantly shifting postmodern nature of the self. In this paper I look primarily at two of his key plays East and Metamorphosis and at his autobiography Free Association and examine his textual and metatextual strategies for constructing and performing what I call the ‘Berkoff phenomenon’.