Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Berkoff

"I’m very resistant to most forms of theater" lands like a backstage confession and a dare at the same time. Coming from Steven Berkoff, an actor-director known for physical extremity and stylized menace, the line isn’t anti-theater so much as anti-complacency. The phrasing matters: resistant, not dismissive. It suggests allergy, friction, an immune response to something that’s become too polite, too domesticated, too eager to be liked.

Berkoff’s career has been a long argument with naturalism and middlebrow comfort. His work tilts toward heightened gesture, grotesque comedy, and a kind of muscular poetry that treats the stage less like a living room and more like a battleground. Read that way, “most forms” is a swipe at the default settings of contemporary theater: tasteful realism, tidy catharsis, the soft prestige of plays that reassure their audiences they’re cultured and decent. Resistance becomes an aesthetic ethic: if the room isn’t a little unstable, if the performer isn’t risking something, then why bother doing it live?

There’s also a subtle bit of self-mythmaking here, the performer positioning himself as an outsider inside the institution. Actors aren’t supposed to be resistant; they’re supposed to be pliable. Berkoff claims the opposite: a refusal to submit to received form, to inherited pieties about what theater should look like. It’s a protective statement, too, guarding against being absorbed by the very industry that grants him a platform. The subtext is simple and combative: theater should bite, not soothe.