How has Jacques Lecoq influenced Berkoff?

One way in which Jacques Lecoq influenced Steven Berkoff  was through sharing the similar view points on mime. In 1965 Berkoff attended Jacques Lecoq's school in Paris, which meant that he would have had a direct insight to all of what Jacques Lecoq's beliefs were in theatre, especially in mime. Lecoq said in an interview about his mime "it is important to be open and not to copy the style of someone else because you will never be as good as he is. Each is better in his own style." Obviously Jacques Lecoq's teaching was important to Berkoff as he believes that actors should break the traditional conventions of mime and try to adapt their own style of mime.

These beliefs in mime were shown when Berkoff adapted Franz Kafka's novel Metamophosis in 1968. It was first put on at the Round House Theatre in London but in 1987 it was put on to TV which stared Tim Roth. In the adaptation, Berkoff staged the performance to be breaking the forth wall for the opening sequels at which point three of the characters used mime to show glimpses into their character traits. For example Berkoff's character of the father would use a sequence (in a clockwork style) pretend to smoke a cigarette by using his fingers and blowing away from them and drinking a glass of beer by forming a mild of the glass in him hands and raising his hand to his mouth. Berkoff's uses of mime show that he wanted to change the pure form of mime because the movements were clockwork, it made the mime look less realistic but it was still convincing enough to know what he was doing. He therefore put his own original twist to mime just like Jacques Lecoq.

In the same play of Metamophosis, Berkoff also used other theories of Jacques Lecoq than just mime. He also encorporated movement, masks and ensemble. In Jacques Lecoq's school he used physical theatre and movement instead of using words and he even had his own set of masks called Larval masks that were especially designed for his students. Berkoff used ensemble work in the play by using the other performers to create the environment for the play. It shows that Jacques Lecoq's teaching did effect Berkoff as he then went on to put his devices into his own plays.

Berkoff has also gone on to influence new performances such as our own Greek theatre performance of Agamemnon. My performed the section of the script were the chorus tries to convince Oresties to kill his mother for revenge. Our task was to conte lories Greek theatre by using physical theatre and we did so by placing the text into a school setting and making the theme as peer pressure. We used Berkoff as our main influence by using his overexagerated voice. For example we decided to use chavy accents in order to show how the students were menacing and modern compared to the Greek theatre and we over emphasised every word like how Berkoff does in his plays. We felt that this modernised our Greek theatre as Berkoff's techniques have only really been around in the last 100 years and it created distinct different techniques compared to the Greeks and most modern theatre.