The unconventional actor puts his own spin on Shakespeare

SOME of the reviews for Steven Berkoff's one-man show Shakespeare's Villains - the last-minute replacement show for The Suicide at next year's Arts Festival - have been so dire they actually make the show irresistible.

We get little enough professional English-language theatre here. So who could fail to be intrigued by a show that one critic called 'desperately, pitiably bad' and another dismissed as 'Berkoff very evidently floundering'? Even a third, the most sympathetic, acknowledged it 'may not tell you much you didn't know about Shakespeare's villains. But it tells you a lot about Berkoff.' Luckily there is a lot about Berkoff that is worth finding out about. The first of these is that the critics almost all hate him, so bad notices do not necessarily mean the show is not interesting.

Berkoff, now 60, is a British theatrical institution of great originality and enormous energy, who stood out in the mid-1970s against the prevailing trend of gritty realism, and created a distinctive, stylised, often violent and instantly recognisable genre of his own.

He has staged remarkable original plays such as East, West, Decadence and Greek, and presented radical versions of Shakespeare.

And along the way he has made many enemies and said many outrageous things about conventional theatre that infuriated his critics.

When he threatened to kill one of them after a particularly harsh review, the editor called the police. The critic survived, and is now a Berkoff fan.