A MAN kills a stranger in a road rage incident, and then runs away from the scene.

In the next town, he meets and falls in love with a woman, whom he marries and has four children with.

As time goes on, a horrible twist of fate reveals that this woman is his estranged mother, and the man he killed was his father.

It could be the latest plot for the Mitchell family in EastEnders, but actually it is one of the most enduring stories in literature – the classical Greek tragedy of Oedipus.

It has been told many times, but the repellent idea of accidentally killing your father and sleeping with your mother has kept audiences enthralled for more than 2,000 years.

The latest version of the Oedipus story, which is about to enjoy its world premiere at South Hill Park in Bracknell, is likely to be the closest one yet to an Albert Square storyline.

Adapted by East End actor Steven Berkoff, who is famous for his roles as a baddie in James Bond films Octopussy and Moonraker and as a gangster in the 1990 film The Krays, the script reads like “a modern-day Shakespeare with a touch of Guy Ritchie”.

Throughout his career Berkoff has revelled in his villainous persona, from appearing as a gambler nobleman in A Clockwork Orange in 1971 to voicing the villain in PlayStation 3 computer game Heavenly Sword in 2006.

Berkoff has always slipped comfortably into the role of the baddie, as he grew up in the same part of East London as the notorious Kray twins, who were just four years older than him.

Born into a Jewish Russian family in Hackney, Berkoff was part of the large immigrant population of East London, and had a hard upbringing. As a young child he was evacuated to Luton during the Second World War, then returned to the blitzed East End to go to Harold Pinter’s old school in Hackney, which he hated.

At the age of 15 he spent a short time in Borstal after stealing a bike. A child who could not settle in the bleak and crumbling world of post-war London, Berkoff used the theatre to escape from his reality.

Berkoff’s hard start in life comes through in his acting and particularly in the plays he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s, many of which have a bleak, nightmarish quality. Known for his “total theatre”, in which Berkoff zooms in and focuses on one emotion using physical theatre and psychological techniques on the audience, it is no surprise that his version of Oedipus is explosive.

Adrian McDougall and Bart Lee are the brave producer and director from the Blackeyed Theatre company who are taking on the challenge of bringing Berkoff’s creation to life at South Hill Park in Bracknell.

“At times it can sound like a Guy Ritchie film, because Berkoff does talk like that and he wants it to be very modern,” says Lee. “But the rest of the time it’s got a Shakespearean feel – it’s iambic pentameter all the way through and he uses this amazingly emotional language.”

“There’s this flavour of the East End throughout the play,” adds McDougall. “But then you get lines like, ‘It smells like some foul piece of rancid meat,’ which takes you back somewhat, but it works uniquely. It’s just Berkoff really – because he’s quite an extreme chap who pushes theatrically in his writing and the emotional extremes are very powerful.”

With Berkoff producing a modernist and bleak script, McDougall and Lee have risen to the challenge of producing an equally powerful setting for the play.

“We’ve decided to set the play a few years into the future where things could have changed slightly,” says Lee.

“It’s set in 2010 to keep it very fresh and very modern. 

“People worship a sun god called Apollo. Global warming is very high on the agenda at the moment, and in the play the sun god is angry with us all. There is a series of solar eclipses between now and 2010, which is not beyond belief, and the sun has got stronger and stronger.

The land has become more ravaged and the people are suffering, so it is a calamity Oedipus has to sort it out.

“Theatrically we have taken that to mean everything is breaking down, and so the language needs to evolve into this Berkoff speak, this language with an East End flavour.”

They have also updated the concept of Greek tragedy in which all the action happens off stage, because the Greeks did not have the special effects, to make it more dramatic.

“When a messenger runs on to tell us what has happened there are tableaux in the background acting it out. There is a lot of blood in Oedipus and we’ve tried to use theatrical creativity to do it in ways that will surprise people.

“We didn’t want to go for the first obvious choice, we wanted to be more shocking and we’ve come up with some solutions that should surprise.”

Despite imprinting their own mark on Oedipus, with dramatic special effects and a stunning set, they are sensitive that this is Berkoff’s play.

When it opens at South Hill Park on Wednesday, February 13, it will be the first time an audience can appreciate his modern take on Oedipus.

“We’re very aware that it’s his play and he has a definite style and a brilliant theatre reputation,” says McDougall.

“We want to reach for that. When he wrote this translation, because he’s an actor he starts to think, ‘How does this person feel?’ He starts to draw on his experiences in his life and career, so I’m sure there’s a lot of him in the play.

“It’s a very personal script but that’s a strength in this because it’s an emotional tragedy, and if you can’t connect to people as a man or as a person then you won’t get any of the tragedy.”

So how did it come about that the world premiere of a previously-unseen Berkoff play is happening at South Hill Park? “I was having a lot of trouble finding a text to produce because I wanted something that would sell that was challenging artistically,” explains McDougall.

“We were looking at Berkoff, then we found at the back of his third collection of plays a version of Oedipus that it said had never been performed. We thought it must have been done since the book was published but it hadn’t.

“Our first thought was, why hasn’t it been performed? We read it very quickly and both thought, this is great, I can’t see why this hasn’t been done before, and hopefully it would come alive on the stage. Adrian worked his magic with the agents and after a couple of weeks they said we could go for it.

“We haven’t heard from Berkoff and he has had no particular input on our production – but we hope he will come and see it.”

Berkoff says, “I’m very excited about Oedipus being performed and it shows the group’s smart taste to choose my version. I really wish it well and shall try to see it.”

Unusually, rehearsals had not even begun yet for the play, which opens in just two weeks.

After six months of organisation, McDougall and Lee have decided to cram all rehearsals into 10 days before the world premiere.

“At the moment we are thinking, how on earth are we going to get this thing up and running, but once you start things just snowball and it’s a very intense two weeks.

“It becomes a play instead of just a script as people say the words and connect with the emotions.

“It’s exciting to watch it mature, you start training the delivery so that it all adds into the play. Once we are all tuned in it takes a week or two and then it really starts working as a performance.

“The final ingredient is the audience and what dynamic they add to the show that changes it.

“In the first performances in South Hill Park we will be asking the audience what they thought about this and that, and once we’ve done that we can take the production that we’ve realised here to every venue. It’s the live spark that makes the play work.”

With Berkoff’s blessing, the Blackeyed Theatre will take Oedipus on a national tour of theatres and schools after its opening four nights in Bracknell, taking in 15 venues including Newcastle, Cambridge, Portsmouth and Bangor.

They hope the play will appeal to school groups as well as drama lovers, as it is a text that often appears on school syllabuses.

“It is important for us to be educational as well as entertaining, because we hope young people

who see the play will enjoy it and become regular theatregoers,” says McDougall.

“Bart has a very dynamic style that is very central to what Blackeyed Theatre does. You have to challenge people – it’s too easy to go and see something that’s entertaining but you don’t get anything from it.

“I believe that great theatre is challenging and stretching an audience out of its comfort zone. We wanted to tackle good texts and this translation is fantastically gutsy.”

Oedipus is guaranteed to stretch you out of your comfort zone, especially as its second night coincides with Valentine’s Day. I ask whether they considered this when they were planning the dates.

“We thought about Valentine’s Day because we’ve actually got our VIP night that night,” admits McDougall.

“I don’t know if couples will want to come, but we thought maybe treat your mother – come and see Oedipus.

“That might appeal to people or not, I suppose it’s a bit of a strange play to see with your mother. There would probably be a deathly silence in the car on the way home, ‘Thanks for that son’.”

INFO:

Oedipus, by Steven Berkoff and performed by Blackeyed Theatre, receives its world premiere at South Hill Park, Bracknell from Wednesday, February 13 to Saturday, February 16.

Performances at 7.30pm with a matinee at 1.30pm on the Thursday. For tickets, call (01344) 484123 or log on to: www.southhillpark.org.uk