Edward David Berman MBE FRSA (born 8 March 1941 in Lewiston, Maine) is an American-born British community educator, social activist, children's poet, playwright, director and producer.
[1] Berman was unable to finish his doctorate at Oxford in 1965, due to an unprovoked attack while researching in Istanbul, Turkey, which left him with a cranial blood clot and a badly damaged back, being given a year to live.
[2] Berman established Inter-Action in London in 1968 to explore new forms of creative and participatory programmes for the Inner City, and find new ways to motivate learning.
Inter-Action commissioned the first community arts resource centre in Europe, which was purpose-built on a derelict Council site in Talacre Road, west Kentish Town, London, designed by Cedric Price.
The Father & Mother Xmas Union (FXU) was set up in 1969 to stage large-scale social and activist events such as protests against the National Front and Selfridges (for using non unionised workers.).
City Farms: In 1971, Berman negotiated with British Rail to take over numerous tracts (10,000 acres) of land throughout the UK that were unusable for development under modern planning legislation because of their proximity to the railway lines.
She had become a London landmark, marked on street maps, so was permitted to retain her warship title and name "HMS President" with the added suffix "(1918)" to distinguish her from the new shore establishment of the same name.
Her sister ship, Chrysanthemum, was hired to Steven Spielberg for the boat chase sequences shot in 1988 in Tilbury Docks for the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
[4][5] Additionally, he has been Chairman of the successful Save Piccadilly Campaign in the 1970s (to stop the high-rise office development surrounding the Circus) and the action against JP Morgan to open their blocking of a walkway/cycling path of the Thames Walkway on the Isle of Dogs.
He has worked in Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, South Africa and India as a director/trainer as well as advising on developing new social enterprises.
The Almost Free also staged numerous individual new plays by Mike Stott, Henry Livings, Michael Stevens, Wolf Mankowitz, Edward Bond and many others.
Sir Tom Stoppard developed several of his key one-act plays for Berman's theatres, including After Magritte, Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth and the highly successful Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land.