‘Basically, I’m a spineless wimp’

Steven Berkoff admits to Lloyd Evans that, despite his reputation, he’s not tough at all

On the waterfront. This, literally, is where I meet Steven Berkoff to discuss his stage adaptation of the classic Fifties movie. Berkoff’s east London office is a sumptuous, spotlessly clean apartment with wraparound views of the grey-green Thames. He strolls in, direct from rehearsals, wearing dark loose baggy clothes. I’d expected a brash, superconfident whirlwind but Berkoff is softly spoken, pensive, hesitantly friendly. He even asks if I mind him smoking a roll-up. ‘Of course not.’ But he doesn’t have one. Instead we sip coffee at a vast polished black table.

There’s something melancholy in the lined complexities of his face, and his pale, brilliant blue eyes haven’t quite the unnerving intensity they once had. I ask why he chose this project. ‘Often plays come into your orbit for unspecific reasons. Maybe they’re fated.’ He spotted the script at the National Theatre by chance. Budd Schulberg had turned his original screenplay into a novel which he then adapted for the stage. ‘It was tried out in New York about 15 years ago. And it sank. When I read the script I realised why. Too much extra luggage.’ Schulberg, now 94, invited Berkoff to direct a new adaptation. ‘I leapt at it. I only need a little encouragement.’

After successful try-outs in Edinburgh and Nottingham the show arrived last week in London at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Berkoff himself plays the mobster Johnny Friendly. ‘Is it a while since you were in the West End?’ ‘A lonnnng time,’ he intones in a funereal voice. In the 1970s he remembers bringing a new play into London virtually every year. These days he has to rely on the artistic directors of the National Theatre and the RSC.