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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Shockingly bad. Intellectual, prejudiced & turgid., 14 Jun 2005
The publishers claim that this "long-awaited and lively study"... "the first thorough and in-depth study of this contentious artist"... "not only fills a large gap in theatre scholarship but also contributes a great deal to our understanding in the postmodern era of the role of performance in identity formation".Well, they have to say something - but that's rubbish! Astonishingly Mr Cross acknowledges Berkoff in his credits for granting him an interview and answering his letters, although the product (and one supposes the methodology also) of this "in-depth study" is conspicuously lacking in evidence of any in-depth consultation with Berkoff's main collaborators or indeed the man himself. This is a lamentably unreadable exercise in intellectual constipation, which fails to shed any new light on its subject, a turgid hatchet job, in which the author, with a written style as anal as his argument, merely hammers away at his oh-so original theory that Berkoff is nothing more than an egomaniac. If you want to read a witty slagging off of Berkoff do a search for "Charles Spencer Berkoff". Far from being "provocative and informative" as the publishers claim, "students at undergraduate and postgraduate level as well as specialist academic researchers and teachers" should ignore this entirely.
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