"I'm very resistant to most forms of theater"

A declaration that sounds hostile to the stage is, paradoxically, a pledge of fidelity to it. Resistance here signals immunity to complacency: an artist raising his threshold so that only the most charged, necessary work can cross it. The line draws a hard border between theater-as-habit and theater-as-event, between comfort and ordeal.

“Most forms” points to conventions that have ossified into routine: soft naturalism that mistakes literalism for truth; the proscenium’s tidy illusion; corporate spectacle selling sensation rather than risk; dramaturgy built on sentimentality, explanations, and tidy catharsis. Even radical vocabularies, once codified, can become museum pieces. The refusal is not against craft but against the tame; not against tradition but against its embalmed versions.

Berkoff’s own practice clarifies the stance. He favors a stripped stage, the actor’s body as architecture, stylized chorus, and verbal muscularity. The energy comes from discipline, precision, and exposure. Influences like Artaud’s cruelty or Meyerhold’s biomechanics are not decorations but demands: theater should wound indifference, sharpen perception, heighten the body’s presence. Resistance becomes a method, pushing against received forms to discover an electric language that cannot be produced by comfort.

There is also a cultural provocation. British theater, with its well-upholstered West End and critical gatekeeping, can smooth rough edges into polite entertainment. Refusing “most forms” rejects domestication by industry, subsidy, or taste. It is a way to keep the medium dangerous, to defend its moral and physical intensity from being diluted into product.

The statement, then, is a challenge to audience and maker alike: do not ask for warmth without heat, elegance without force, relevance without risk. Make work that can overcome the resistance, work whose necessity is felt in the body, whose form is earned by its urgency, whose style is not a manner but a pressure. Love of theater, expressed as resistance, protects it from becoming whatever is merely theatrical.