Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an actor, writer and a director. Born to a Jewish family in London's East End,

he drifted through a succession of unfulfilling jobs until someone suggested he went to drama school. Drama he says changed my life but

although he proved a successful actor touring in rep and working for a spell in

Hollywood he never fully achieved what he wanted. That only came when he started to write, to perform, and to direct his own plays.

Energetic and compelling, his work has brought him an international reputation, and his last West End production,

Kvech, was voted comedy of the year. He is Stephen Berkov. That's the case, isn't it Stephen,

that you found true happiness, as it were, as an actor manager, a role in which you were beholden to nobody but yourself?

Well, it's true because it was a time when you could really determine your own fate.

For many years I felt that I was a victim of fate.

You know, you waited a slave to the telephone and to the agent who would call you with the magic

news that you've got kind of three weeks in Cardiff or a summer season in Buxton.

And I had a most marvelous time in Repp.

I found it was one of the most stimulating and constructive and

educative times of my life.

But after a while, parts while parts came, you know, became fewer and fewer, and the

phone would ring with less frequency, and perhaps became also more demanding for a different and better kind of work.

And so the only thing that one can do really is to become master of your own destiny to a certain extent.

But then every production you do therefore was your baby you had

usually written it or quite often you'd written it you'd certainly conceived how it

...