Steven Berkoff links
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East The author of Kvetch and East has no use for subtlety. |
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East Theatre Alive
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East The Age, Cameron Woodhead, 28 Mar 2006
This is comedy at its ugliest, as likely to arouse
disgust as provoke laughter. But satire is never meant to
be simply funny. At its best, it stabs you in the head,
wounds you into thought. And Berkoff's foul caricatures
are, in their way, every bit as nasty as that notorious
piece of satire from Jonathan Swift suggesting that, if
the Irish were starving, they should eat their own
babies. |
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The Fall of the House of Usher D.C.A.C. 1997
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The
Fall of the House of Usher
British playwright Steven Berkoff's adaptation of
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is impressive,
inventively maintaining Edgar's role as narrator while
shaping dialogue from Poe's highly descriptive
first-person narrative. The actors are often called on to
cleverly represent the decaying house, whether it's
Henley personifying the dwelling in a speech about its
condition or Murray posing as a creaking door. Berkoff
even dares to inject a bit of humor into the dismal
proceedings, making light of the mad Roderick's inability
to keep Romania and Bohemia straight during a failed
attempt at polite conversation and at one point having
him morosely say, "I greet you with my usual
vivacious warmth." |
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The
Fall of the House of Usher (link is
down) Firehall Arts Centre 1994 Small,
perfect details stand out: light drifts in through a
slightly moving curtain, highlighting only the lace cuff
of an otherwise darkened figure. Later, a bloodied
Madeline silently but desperately claws the air behind an
intermittently illuminated scrim. Poe was a masterful
creator of psychological thrillers. Add to this witches
cauldron Berkoffs strange but compelling
adaptation, Sandhano Schultzes stylish
multi-layered direction, and the casts unwavering
fidelity to style and you have an intoxicating brew that
is the stuff of the nightmare world-beautiful in all its
horror." Jo Ledingham The Courier. |
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Arts | The Fall of the House of Usher (link is down) Review by Nick Lewis. With a sense of melancholy and fatefulness, brother and sister Roderick and Madeleine, played by Simon Startin and Pamela Mungroo, decide to act out the book they are reading in bed The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, which tells of the decline of an ancient house into putrefaction and incest. ...The sense of horror and psychic control is
built up as the actors speak Berkoff's stage directions:
"Bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows set amidst a
few rank sedges." And in an "eye-like
window" above the bed, a videoed signer the
screen sometimes spattered with blood appears. |
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The Fall of the House of Usher (link is down) Kerryn Chan, 11 Jun 1999 The company
members climbed over one another, acted as arches to the
old manor, all bent and transformed by age and decay.
They formed "live" props such as the huge
dining table where Roderick and Madeline partook their
daily meals. In the next instant, they arched their
bodies to become the vault of a tomb that was closed over
a screaming Madeline. Movement was the sheer forte of
this group, and they capitalised it to their advantage.
Facial expressions were also not lacking from these young
actors, contorting their faces to portray the mood of the
moment, be it pain, torment, despair or conflict. |
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The Fall of the House of Usher (link is down) Arthur Kok, 11 Jun 1999 Central to Poe's tale is Roderick's assertion that the House itself pulses with malevolent intent. To recreate this, the cast undertook another clever technique: with each contortion, the chorus became the House's gothic archways, labyrinthine catacombs, religious icons, ornate furniture and even vegetative compounds, writhing with every human contact. Organic and sentient, the House's crumbling integrity both mirror and speed along the splintering lives of those who inhabit it. |
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