Posted by: Iain Fisher
« on: October 30, 2010, 09:18:12 PM »The book reviewed by John Nathan in The Jewish Chronicle, 28 Oct 2010.
"Despite the title, this is not a diary but a memoir. It looks back with a great deal of anger at a childhood that could have easily led to a life of petty crime and underachievement. Instead, it led to a career as a writer, theatre director and creator of some of the most distinctive stage productions this country has seen...
...if Berkoff has a sense of injustice, it is not entirely unfounded. He has produced some very fine stage work, such as the muscular depictions of thuggery in East or his visceral adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, without ever being embraced by the theatrical establishment.
...But, for someone who has carved a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices on the British stage, he gives you an awful lot of plodding prose to wade through before that voice eventually emerges.
...He left education - at Hackney Downs School he remembers Pinter's teacher belatedly acknowledging that Berkoff had some talent - with seething memories of corporal punishment and went into the world with little parental encouragement - none at all from his tailor father.
Life as an unskilled office worker and stealer of bikes, for which he was sent to Borstal, beckoned.
This ultimately winning portrait is of a sensitive boy who could be tough when he had to but who was starved of love. But don't feel too sorry: all this pain made this sometimes angry but essentially creative adult what he is, to theatregoers' lasting benefit.
The full review is here
www.thejc.com/arts/book-reviews/40298/review-diary-a-juvenile-delinquent
"Despite the title, this is not a diary but a memoir. It looks back with a great deal of anger at a childhood that could have easily led to a life of petty crime and underachievement. Instead, it led to a career as a writer, theatre director and creator of some of the most distinctive stage productions this country has seen...
...if Berkoff has a sense of injustice, it is not entirely unfounded. He has produced some very fine stage work, such as the muscular depictions of thuggery in East or his visceral adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, without ever being embraced by the theatrical establishment.
...But, for someone who has carved a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices on the British stage, he gives you an awful lot of plodding prose to wade through before that voice eventually emerges.
...He left education - at Hackney Downs School he remembers Pinter's teacher belatedly acknowledging that Berkoff had some talent - with seething memories of corporal punishment and went into the world with little parental encouragement - none at all from his tailor father.
Life as an unskilled office worker and stealer of bikes, for which he was sent to Borstal, beckoned.
This ultimately winning portrait is of a sensitive boy who could be tough when he had to but who was starved of love. But don't feel too sorry: all this pain made this sometimes angry but essentially creative adult what he is, to theatregoers' lasting benefit.
The full review is here
www.thejc.com/arts/book-reviews/40298/review-diary-a-juvenile-delinquent