Good evening and welcome to this big tent live event brought to you by the humanities cultural programme itself,
one of the founding stones of the Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities here in Oxford.
I'm Wes Williams. I'm the director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
And it's my enormous pleasure to be introducing the beginning of this evening's event.
And mainly to say that it's an enormous pleasure, as I say, to come from live from the story museum here in Oxford.
What a perfect setting this is for tonight's discussion. We're all, as you can see, socially distancing whilst also live streaming this event.
And we hope that you are safe and well wherever you are in the world.
Before I hand over to our expert chair, I'd like to remind you that you can share comments and questions in the chat,
but underneath the screen on YouTube to tell us more about this evening's event and about our two amazing guests,
I'd like to welcome our chair for this evening. Dr. Saltz, Eltis associate professor in the English faculty and tutorial fellow at the college.
Oxford Cels teaches Victorian modern and contemporary literature with an emphasis on theatre.
She's written a number of books, one on the plays of Oscar Wilde and another on Women and Sex on Stage,
alongside work on other contemporary authors Pinter, Coward, Betty Beckett, Rhatigan and Bernard Shaw.
She is, she tells me, currently dithering her words between writing.
On the one hand, another book about Oscar Wilde and the other,
a book about the theatrical representation of work from melodrama through to early socialist dramas to musical comedies to the play of ideas.
It's hard to think of anyone better qualified to introduce our guests for tonight's lecture.
Sorry, it's not a lecture at all. It's a conversation.
So over to you of thank you us and welcome everybody to this wonderful event with Lalita Chakravarti and Matt Wolf from the Oxford Story Museum.
Welcome and thank you so much for doing this.
So Lalit Chakrabarti is an award winning playwright and actress with a long and diverse career and frankly, terrifying array of talent.
She trained at RADA, and her acting credits include a performance as Gertrude opposite Tom Hiddleston and Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet,
starring in Fanny and Alexander at the Old Vic and forthcoming Amazon series Wheel of Time.
And in another series, the BBC called Vigil.
Her most recent achievements as a playwright include Life of Pi, a stage adaptation of Yann Martel's famous novel,
which opened at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019 and won four awards at the UK Theatre Awards, including Best Play and Best Director.
It will open in London's West End in 2021.
Yes, we are so looking forward to that.
She's also written Invisible Cities, which premiered in Manchester International Festival, which he adapted from the classic novel by Italo Calvino.
It's an ambitious, stunning site.
Specific production in 2012, a wonderful play, Red Velvet staging the life of the remarkable 19th century African-American tragedian.
IRA Aldridge premiered at the Tricycle Theatre in London and went on to play to critical acclaim in New York and London's West End.
Red Velvet was nominated for nine major awards,
including two Oliviers and Lalita won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for most promising playwrights.
I promise. I have to say she has delivered on. Absolutely.
I think it's an all too promising playwright, but deliver the playwright to say that she curated the greatest wealth at the Old Vic in London in 2018,
commissioning eight monologues of which she wrote one about the NHS on its 20th birthday,
most recently in February this year, her moving and gripping to hand him streamed live from the Almeida,
staging a love between men that is neither physical nor romantic. It starred Danny Sapone and her husband, Adrian Lester.
Matt Wolf is an American theatre critic based in London, where he moved directly upon completing his degree from Yale in English for 21 years,
he has worked as foreign arts correspondent and a leading voice on British theatre,
one of the most informed, judicious, insightful critics writing today on the theatre.
He's been London theatre critic for Variety and then for the International Herald Tribune.
In 2009, he helped boost the Arts Desk,
an art centred website that within a few years of its inception was named Best Specialist Journalism website at the Online Media Awards in London.
Thank you for joining us, Matt and Lalita. And if we could now start with a quick clip from him, Lolita's latest play.
Three two one oh oh oh nine.
What was he like, your dad? It was hard to get his approval, but when I did Jesus, it was like the sun was shining on me.
Miss swallow your pride. If I have things you need to borrow.
And as you may or may not get from that clip, I have to say, it was watching and only watching online, which is sadly the only way we could see it.
I was so gripped by the relationship between the two men that when one said, I've invested money, my money, and I just got so tense.
And so I had to stop and watch the markets the next day thinking I need a little bit of distance and I won't give away the plot at all.
I hate people who give plot spoilers, but what I felt at the end was love.
I really did. And that's an extraordinary achievement for a play that you wrote to be performed in person with people
locked in the room and that closed and then instead was scattered watching it through a screen.
So tell me about translating the two, or would you have done anything different if you'd known it was going to be online?
No, I don't think so. It's a play. It's for theatre.
And I'm so glad that it left you with a feeling of love, because that's exactly what it's a love story between two men.
And no, I wouldn't have done anything different.
The process was very unusual in that we thought, you know, when when my grandkids tell me, ask me, what did you do in the pandemic drama?
I'll be able to go, wow, I started with this play that was going to be normal, you know, in a in a theatre totally full.
Then it was going to be socially distanced. Then we locked down. And Adrian, who was in the play, my husband and I got covid.
And then it was, how do we make this happen? Can we make this happen?
Are we well enough? Yes, let's live stream it. And so it organically happened.
And the Almeda, Rupert called it the artistic director was amazing because he absolutely roll with the punches and went,
how how do we make a piece of theatre now?
And so we knew maybe two or three weeks before it was streamed that that's where we were going.
So I think we have that benefit of knowing. Right. We are working for Camera and Adrian Downing.
The two actors were also versed in in theatre and film, so they know how to play a camera as well.
So that was very that was a brilliant given. Yeah.
So it's a wonder, I mean,
in the sense that it feels so much of the theatre in the way is also that it feels like it has a huge cast because so much of its identity
coming from who you love and who's around you and family and everything else that I felt like I'd seen about 20 people despite only two,
which seems like something that you it's sort of built into your writing in some ways.
That's sort of what theatre can do that. No, but nothing else can. It's all about relationships.
Right. So you want to see people play a relationship and when you're on stage.
When you take everything away, if you took the SAT, the costume, the lights, everything,
it's me and you and our relationship and that's the joy of theatre, is how do we play?
So forget I know the whole point is the audience, forget the audience and get to them in the moment.
And it's all about that thread between the two actors. And so in order for the actor to feel it's so exposing such an exposing thing theatre,
you have to feel very secure within the words within the environment that you're in and within your history.
And so I I guess I'm I like writing history for people.
And who are they? Who were they? Who do they want to be?
What I know and family and relationships offstage are as important, particularly in something like this,
where you are not limited to two actors, but you want to create the world around them,
because that really makes me think of the relationship between IRA Aldridge and Alan Tree when
they're sort of learning to act off each other and kind of train each other in that intimacy.
But in red velvet, so much of it's also about how in the theatre, it's not just those two people in that moment.
It's all the assumptions, theatre traditions, how we watch.
They kind of get in the way or. Yes, or dictate how we understand what's actually being.
But that's kind of life. Right? So even now, we are all judged on how we look, how we sound, what we wear, what we order in a cafe.
You know what we're judged on? Everything and everything about us tells a story.
And so within that environment where your you have a stranger,
an outsider coming into the inside world of the theatre where everybody knows each other, but then even within them, there is hierarchy and status.
Who who is leading this company?
The women have to be less than the men, even though that talent might be more you know, all of those details are there.
So I think they're all judging each other. That's all the politics. Yeah.
But there's also that contradiction that in theatre, the real is often less real than the theatrical.
Explain that. Well, I just think, well, how are Auldridge cannot play Othello because he's black in that in that context,
according to the set of all the racist assumptions at the time and so on.
So that's actually the real doesn't there's prejudice causing that.
Yes. Well, it's the judgements of the people who would be watching him and their preconceptions of what a black actor is.
And what's brilliant about doing this play now a red velvet now is that we've moved on, thank goodness.
And you judge it through a different lens. But there are still there are details in the lens.
We judge it through now. So people had very different responses to the play.
A few men, not a lot of men said to me that Harlina, the Polish journalist, they didn't see the point of her and women would say, I loved Harlina.
That was me. And what I really liked was people identified with different characters within it.
And it made it a more complex experience. So it's always politics, just the politics and how it's everything.
Politics really right from that. Let's have a clip from Red Velvet.
Great. IRA Eldridge was a black American actor who came to Britain from New York.
He played Shakespeare and other parts up and down the country, and he was arguably one of the most famous actors around at the time.
Some theatre is fun, some theatre passes at the time, some theatre is a bit of a laugh,
but I hope the cast hopes and we all hope that this play will be amongst those pieces of theatre.
That's important. That's why I think.
Lovely to see that clip and to be reminded of a play from so many years ago, and yet the memory is very immediate.
One of the remarkable things that you've been doing during the last years,
if you haven't been doing enough, is writing a book with your husband, Adrian Lester, about your careers.
And it's told in sort of general format, and it's called a working diary.
And it's extremely insightful and with reference to red velvet.
You have a very interesting moment in the book where you say that you worry that it might have been a one off.
And I wondered what you meant by that.
Was it because you thought I don't have another place in me or that the acting will overtake the writing or I don't want to write another play?
I'm only going to write a play with my husband. Interesting. I don't remember writing that, but it must have been that day.
I think people thought it might have been a one off.
That's what I feel now because when I started writing well, I've been writing a long time before Red Velvet was on,
but when I came out and with this play, it wasn't very well accepted, but it wasn't a usual path an actor would write.
And so I think I was it was regarded as, oh, you've written this amazing piece and it's obviously been in your mind and heart for quite a long time.
It took me so long to realise it. Maybe that's it.
So I feel I feel that was more I can't remember what I wrote in the day, but I feel maybe that was more how I how I would interpret that now.
So rewinding the tape before Red Velvet, I first became aware of you, of course,
as an actor and all sorts of roles of the National Theatre and elsewhere, but particularly a very acclaimed actor.
I'll never forget a performance he gave at the World Court in 2007 in a very powerful play at the World Court upstairs called Free Out,
going by an Indian writer called Anupama Chandrasekar. And you played the single mother of a teenager who gets caught up in a sexting scandal.
And this seems to be absolutely a play right for attention again today.
So the point is your acting career seemed to be going very well.
How then did you fold writing into the mix? It's funny how it seems and how it feels.
Right. So I guess, am I a successful actor?
I work, which is great. It's great. And I have some really good roles. But there are always gaps.
There are always gaps in which you get bored and you need to stay creatively alive.
And then also some of the parts that I play can be frustrating because you're playing functional roles that help other people's stories.
And that's fine. That's what the party is. But that's what you're limited to doing.
And there's so much more that you could be doing. So I guess I started writing because I wanted to exercise every single part of me.
I didn't want to be limited to the part I was given and I wanted to write things that I knew I was capable of.
And so now I've made a bit of a rod for my back because it's I've got two careers and
and and they're both really touchwood if there was any wood around going really well.
So how do I fold it? I'm just dogged, very disciplined.
I mean, writing and discipline is one thing that people really talk about, you know, how do you crack the discipline?
So it took me a few years to crack that and go, OK, I won't go for a walk.
I'm going to write the computer, I'm going to sit and do it. And now I write everywhere.
So if I'm filming, I will write on my way to set. I will write in between scenes, I will write everywhere.
And then I leave the space for the acting as well. Interesting that you've written several times for Adrien.
One of the reasons that sometimes people write plays is to give themselves a vehicle.
Have you thought about writing for yourself and are you writing for yourself? Yes, I have.
Now, I sort of avoided it to start with because I had advice that just be the writer is hard enough being the writer of a play.
And that advice was really good because with red velvet it was so overwhelming to suddenly be the writer rather than a performer.
It's a very different level of exposure. And so I sort of adopted that is not writing for myself, but I have written a couple of projects for myself.
Yes.
As a play called Karma that before the pandemic was going to be on in Birmingham at the Wrap, which I hope will happen as we start to open up again.
And then there's a film as well that I've written a part for myself in.
Tell us about what role have you written for yourself and the play be interesting.
How do you see yourself as a character in a play? Interestingly, it's not how I see myself, but it's a good part.
And so the karma is about three generations of women in one family.
And the grandmother is a self-help guru, the daughter, her daughter,
which is the part I would play as a psychiatrist, and her daughter, who's 18, is in crisis.
And it's about mental health within sort of a female family and and the expectations on women and.
How hard is being a girl, no matter what age you are?
And it's funny, I mean, it's really visceral and anything that makes me laugh is always on the slightly on the wrong side.
You know, where if I know it makes me laugh. I know it'll get theatre laughing because I, I've got a wicked sense of humour.
So so it's funny, but it's also about the pressures on these three women.
It's very interesting, again, in your memoir that one feels a kind of tension in terms of agency and power because you talk in the
book about the good thing about being an actor is you get hired for the job and then you do it.
End of story with a writer. Of course, it's potentially much more and more and more fierce.
But on the other hand, it's your baby, which is not the case when you're acting as an actor.
I I'm hired at the probably at the very end of production, you know, where all the work's been done.
And then I come in and interpret it and it's great.
You know, you go in and you just do it from one point of view, from the point of view of your character,
and you fit into the story that has been seamlessly worked out by somebody else.
But as a writer, I mean, the thing I really I really miss as a writer when I'm being that person with that hat is that as an actor,
everyone thinks what you do is marvellous. So you do something brilliant. That's fabulous.
Could you try this? Could you try that? And as a writer, you get none of that. You just get right.
This doesn't work. That doesn't work. This doesn't work. And you get all the notes of how to make it better.
So it took me a little while to realise, oh, I don't I don't get the applause. I just have to I just have to go in and get the notes.
It's an endless stream of notes, because when you were at the Donmar, John Gabriel Borkman, a production I remember very well,
you were directed by Michael Grandage, where you're not who, of course, is somebody now a very successful director who had begun as an actor.
And Michael has always said when asked, does he want to return to acting, he says absolutely not.
So I just wonder whether, as you said over to writing, whether it may be part of you said, like, Michael, I'm going to put my acting days behind me.
But it sounds like you never said I've not been able to.
When I first came out as a writer, people said, well, you're going to give up the acting now, aren't you?
Because now this is happening and I can't explain it.
No, it's just I love acting. I absolutely love it.
If you get the part, the bit I don't love is when the parts are boring and you just have to do it because you have to pay the bills.
You know, that's what my dad says to me. Well, every job is boring.
And I think, oh, OK, fair enough. OK, this is the boring bit.
But but when you get a role that requires the skill and the craft to look at the history,
look at the character, work out, why do I say this at this moment? What is this relationship and how can I fly and play it live?
I mean, nothing replaces that. It's it's a fabulous feeling once you're riding it.
So, no, I can't give up the acting, although I understand there's a powerlessness in acting, which I'm very lucky that I can instigate projects.
Now with writing, I can say, right, I've got a blank piece of paper. I want to tell this story.
As an actor, you can never you can instigate projects and you can also.
You were just talking about your father. You can also honour a member of your family.
And didn't you write a play at the Old Vic, which directly influenced by your dad?
And maybe you can just tell us what that was like to have that ability to honour a parent on stage?
It's an amazing thing. The Old Vic asked me.
I was in Fanny and Alexander, which you are talking about swords and and they asked if I would curate one of their one voice seasons,
which is a short experimental moment where they commissioned monologues about a certain epic anniversary topic.
And it was the 17th birthday of the NHS. So my dad's an orthopaedic was an orthopaedic surgeon.
He's retired now. And so I love the NHS. I've grown up in it.
You know, we used to go there every Christmas and my dad would anatomically carve the turkey for the patients.
You know, we'd serve it. You know, it was that kind of that's how much I feel very at home in a hospital.
And so when they gave me this option, I was like, I would love to do that.
And also because all the doctors and nurses and staff that I've met are from everywhere.
They they are the world that I see. And I wanted to honour that.
So I had the luxury of of of commissioning these eight different writers, of which I was one eight amazing actors.
Adrien directed it actually. And and then my piece, it was each decade of the NHS.
So mine was the nineteen eighties. And because I've been so busy sort of talking to the other writers and trying to get the stories,
you know, different and varied, I'd forgotten about mine.
I thought, God, what am I going to write about. And I thought my dad.
So I interviewed my dad a couple of times and he explained to me how you do a hip operation and the
cutting of the Fascher and the precision of this incision and that incision in the bone and all of this.
And then I constructed a story based around him.
It wasn't him completely, but based around his experience and the stories he told me of medicine in India when he was there.
And it was brilliant art. Malik played the part. And when my. Art Malik, he was who he was.
It was just lovely, you know, there he is. He's not a man of the theatre, my dad.
And so to meet somebody who was playing him, he was he was really chuffed and lovely.
And is it fair to assume as we move out of the pandemic, God willing, that, you know,
the last 14 months for an actor might have been extraordinarily difficult because
people are wondering where's the work and how are they going to find the work? But you, of course, didn't have to just cling to that.
You could you know, you can write regardless of what's going on in the broader world.
So in a sense, have you been using this period to really focus on the writing?
I've been unbelievably busy. I think most of the writers I speak to have been.
It's been a time for development, right? A time to sit in in your room with your computer and have your thoughts.
That's all that's been left to us all locked down in a pandemic. And actually that is writing.
So, yeah, I've been really, really busy, which is how I wrote him. So him has been a it wasn't a locked down play.
I was commissioned for it before we went into this crazy time.
But it has been because it's a two hander and you could do it socially distanced if we were clever,
which Blanche MacIntire, our director, was very clever. That was speeded through.
So Red Velvet took me seven years to get on stage and 30 draughts and him took me a year and five draughts where I thought,
oh my God, this is so quick it needs to be good enough. So I worked really hard on it.
What is it like that when you're ready specifically for the person to whom you're married?
In other words, do you and agree boundaries?
At the end of the day, you're not kind of, you know, lying up till two o'clock in the morning saying, what about that third line of defence?
And your daughters are going, Mom, dad, stop. Let's talk about something else.
I mean, do you actually sort of agree boundaries or is it constantly with you 24/7? My gosh, I think we wouldn't be married if that was the version.
And, you know, there are there are proper boundaries that have not been spoken but have, like osmosis been worked out.
I think Adrian knows to leave me to it.
I don't like being bothered when I'm doing the first draught. It has to come.
I often don't like a director attached to a first draught.
I don't like anybody informing me what I should be giving me that voice because I need to feel the story and own it and do my version.
And then once I've done the first draught, everyone can talk about it and tell me what they think.
So yes, Adrian is very he's not hands on as you think.
He's he's he knows what I'm trying to say. And I think that's that that is the sort of majority of writing.
Is that in your head you think you're saying something and on the page you're not.
When somebody else reads it, a third person with it, it doesn't say what you're trying to say.
But Adrian will go. I know what you're trying to say. Try this, try that, and then [INAUDIBLE] help me get there.
But, um, no, it's it's brilliant working with him because he knows when to ease off.
And he also knows that I need my space to tell the story. You talk about a third person reading it.
And of course, one interesting string Jiabo has to do with adaptation and in adaptations.
There's always the third person who is the author of the source material,
whether it's a teller Calvina with Invisible Cities or Yamato with Life of Pi.
And we have some clips from those that we can look at in a minute.
But I just thought maybe it might be interesting to hear a little bit just generally about the appeal of adaptation.
And then we can look at the clips. What why adapt when you can write original work?
What's the joint adapting? I think writing original work draws on the same my my experiences in life and my ideas of story.
And actually you have to preserve that a little bit.
As with acting, you know, you can't when I was it rather we did an exercise sense memory Stanislavski, I was trained in Stanislavski's method.
And since memory is about using experiences that you have yourself and putting it into a character, so one, I've gone off piste, but stay with me.
One, I remember asking my acting teacher that if you have to play a murderer, how can you do that truthfully?
And she said, you know,
when you're trying to kill a mosquito and just imagine that feeling of trying to get the mosquito and that feeling is how you play a murderer.
You kind of translate that. And so that sense of truthfulness, there's a limit to your own experience.
And so having an adaptation, a book where someone's given me the story,
they might not have solved the structural drive of it or or the three act sense of it,
that they might not have solved that, but they'd give me the characters.
They've given me what happens at the beginning, maybe not the middle and the end, and I have to work out how to get there.
It's really exciting.
When I did Yun's book Life of Pi, I felt I felt like he was in the room all the time and I had to honour his amazing book My Way.
So it felt very supportive. Actually, Italo coverers book is a different thing, but.
It definitely would Life of Pi, should we look at a few years from the loss of Life of Pi and Invisible Cities?
I mean, talk about a spectrum of work here, you've got him which is paired to the bone,
a two hundred very distilled, and here you have these kind of extravaganzas.
I noticed that one of the reviews of Invisible Cities said very admiring review, said that this ought to be unstable.
And yeah, obviously it wasn't on stage because it was stage.
So how do you enter into something that ought to be on stage?
But Leo Warner, the director who is the head of Fifty Nine Productions,
is digital and video production company, said to me, you know, I mean, Italo Calvino is book.
I haven't come across it before. And when I read it, it's like a crazy book.
You know, this opium fuelled discussion between Kubelik and Marco Polo and this these 55 cities that are cities under the ground,
cities in the sky, cities under water, crazy things. I mean, you could put this on stage.
How am I going to do this in a quiet theatrical manner? And he said, just write the impossible and we'll stage it.
And so that's absolutely what I did.
And, you know, at the end of the play, I have Marco Polo shows Kubla Khan through digital projection, his entire empire.
So we go through historic Grecians cities and, you know,
Middle Eastern cities that come into present cities, into future cities and New York and all these things.
And then it explodes. The world explodes. And Leo did it.
But that must have been so interesting because actually, although the writer is presumably the person who's usually in control with that one,
I bet you didn't really know how it was going to turn out, did you? Because there were so many, so many different.
And there were 22 dancers from Rombauer and Sidi Larbi Sharkawi, who is choreographing.
And it was a site specific, specially built theatre by a designer who is an architect.
So she built all this sort of architectural set.
It was an extraordinary thing to do, but it was a very different way of working because it was spatial.
And that's why I wanted to do it, because it was a it was epic be it was this impenetrable book,
which some people go, that's my seminal novel of my life. And some people go, oh, my God, I didn't understand it.
And I was sort of sat between the two of them going, yes, I understand both of you.
I'm such a Gemini, you know, and and but to work with this epic storytelling and these different media and kind of theatrical sky's the limit.
Obviously, financially it wasn't. But just imagine what what the story could be and let's try and make it happen.
Was that good? Was that a good springboard for doing Life of Pi? Just because they were both big, they were both involving lots of different elements.
Was that helpful when it came time to do Life of Pi? Well, in that way that it never rains, but it pours.
I did those jobs simultaneously, so they were literally rehearsing at the same time.
And I'm in rehearsals rewriting at exactly the same time.
So I was going from Sheffield to Manchester to London and just kind of making going slightly crazy and eating a lot of chocolate, I think.
But I'm sure they informed each other. But they I mean, it was thrilling, thrilling because Life of Pi is again digital projection in a different way.
Puppet's a very strong story. Fantastic Director Max Webster pulling all these elements together.
Beautiful score of music by a composer who works a lot in Bollywood movies.
Yeah, it's both really exciting.
We have a wonderful anecdote in your book about with the rehearsals for Life of Pi, the rehearsal room in Sheffield originally not being big enough.
So quandary about how can we get a rehearsal, we can actually accommodate all these people, these people and all these puppets.
You know, we had an orang-utan, a tiger, a zebra, I mean, a full sized puppet zebra.
These are big puppets. And then because it was such an epic piece, we had a rehearsal boat.
So the boat comes out of the stage in the production. And so they built us a boat and it's on a revolve.
So they built us a boat because to get these five characters on a boat and make it that you can see everybody and you can see the story happening,
we needed the boat in the room, but once they built the boat in the rehearsal room, there was no space for the rest of us.
So it was it was it was challenging for sure. But of course, Life of Pi also had an issue that that Invisible Cities wouldn't have had clearly,
which is that Life of Pi was is known to many who may not even know.
It was a book. Yes. Known to many from a film for which Ang Lee won the Oscar for best director.
So that's not exactly an incidental thing. So how did you how did you deal with that or did you just sort of put that totally to one side?
I saw the film when it came out and I loved it, but I didn't watch it again.
And thankfully for me, which isn't great in life, I don't remember very much.
So it's so it's great. I didn't really remember the film and then the book I loved when I read it, when it first came out.
And so I read that again and again and and that it's a totally different story actually.
And there are elements in the book that I really wanted to.
Floor that just aren't in the film at all, so I didn't think about the film because again, with reference to your book,
you talk about being very pleased that the critics of Life of Pi appreciated the layering of themes that you hoped would be palpable.
And it seems as if that's been appreciated. And now, of course, that trailer is for a production that wasn't able to happen because of the pandemic,
but now will be able to happen towards the end of this year.
Can you say something then about maybe what the play can allow for those people who think I saw the movie?
I don't need to see it again. What can the play give them? The play will give them a thrilling ride because it's basically about survival,
which is what we've all done right during this pandemic in varying degrees of awfulness and difficulty.
It is about I mean, it's literally about a boy who who the ship thinks his family drowned.
He's alone on a boat with these four wild animals or a Bengal tiger, an orang-utan, a zebra and a hyaena.
And how more now than actually when I wrote it, being on the ship, the shipwreck of life,
you know, my God, we're all we've all been bobbing on the Pacific, haven't we?
We've all been in our boat going, oh, my goodness, what where am I?
What's going to happen? And will I reach the shore? So it's a it's it's the puppets are amazing.
The puppet work. Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes, who made and directed the puppets are so lifelike but theatrical.
And Yann Martel, the novelist, was insistent that the animals are scary because these wild animals would be.
And it was a great note actually, because they are. So it's a thrilling ride, but it's also a piece of theatre and it's beautiful to watch.
But it sounds actually very movingly from what you're saying is if there there
is potentially something more apposite about the material now post pandemic,
when we do get to see it at Wyndham's, then there might have been in June. Twenty twenty.
Who would have thought that. Yeah, who would have thought that everything takes on a new spin.
Right. And that's, that's the great thing about live theatre is the relevance to where you are now.
You go into a space with a group of other people and you examine the life on stage, whatever it might be, but your own.
Can you say a little bit the leader, because it's been so interesting for those of us observing theatre about how
productions have been sort of held in abeyance during the pandemic because many,
many productions were announced, were rehearsed, whatever, a lot of them have fallen by the wayside.
And I know in London and on Broadway,
there have been quite a few that have been kind of just put put in a metaphorical room and waiting to be released.
Was it always the case that you knew Life of Pi would come back?
Were the actors and you and Max, the directors sort of staying in touch just to chat each other along?
How did you keep it palpable? The funny thing, you know, being a writer, I'm now on the management side.
So when I'm an actor, I'm on the acting side. But when I'm a writer, I'm on the management side.
So I wasn't with the actors going, what's going on? Because because you don't it's a different sort of relationship.
But I knew Life of Pi was going to happen because we had such an extraordinary response in Sheffield.
We only ran for three weeks and the reviews and the chat about it was amazing.
And it's is a book that sold 50. I'm not taking credit for that.
Fifteen million copies of this book have been sold around the world and the film.
So it's got this huge following anyway. So I think if any show was hopefully going to come back, Life of Pi was a shoo in.
So I was lucky in that. I think it was. Yeah, I think it was always going to happen.
And did you use this time to tweak or tinker with it in a way that you might not have done otherwise just because you have the luxury of time?
Or is there a point you just have to say no enough. I've done what I'm going to do.
I was always going to tinker with it because until it's only right, when it's right.
And as we go into rehearsal again, I'm sure there'll be other things that need to be changed because it's a different it's a process theatre that's
that's that we're going to build out into the stalls and it's going to be a different Sheffield is a thrust stage.
So we need to adapt our production as well as the theatre to facilitate the show.
So in terms of the technical storytelling, I might have to change some of it to fit what we're able to do.
But no, I did do I did rewrites anyway, but not huge ones because the basic story works.
But there were certain relationships, certain moments that with the luxury of hindsight,
you can go, oh yeah, I can just do that in the peace and quiet without the kind of crazy. Oh, my God, we're opening.
We're previewing. We've got to get it on. I've managed to do that now as a multi hyphenate, which you are an actor writer.
If you ever thought of adding a director to the mix, because as you know,
there are playwrights like Arthur Fugard who writes and sometimes directs his own work.
Alan Ayckbourn, same thing. Would you like to muddle?
No, never. I'm not a director in the slightest at all.
It's not something I. I can give you a thought. Like, I don't mind sitting next to a bit.
Like Maxwell often asked me, what are you.
And blanched the same, you know, and I give thoughts in terms of what I think the line means and what I intended,
but no, I do not want the responsibility of making it all come together in a beautiful thing.
I get the impression, too, that it's very interesting that as a writer and this is this is a real critics question,
that as a writer you are reading the reviews because you want to know what the critics are saying.
Now, I'm always told and maybe the actors are lying, but I'm always told that actors never read the reviews or they do when their mum,
since the reviews to them is over, but never while the run is on because that's the last thing you want.
So are you sort of readjusting your relationship to the press as well?
I read all reviews even. It's not even as an actor.
And when Ellen and Red Velvet says, you know, we have to read the reviews because we have to know what they see, otherwise, what's the purpose of us?
That's why I think I think I need to I mean, not all forgive me, but some critics are free to say, yeah, yeah.
But I like to know what is being seen, perceived put out there.
And sometimes there's something really useful. Sometimes there's something really encouraging.
Um, yeah. I always I've always read reviews.
Do you feel as if you're writing, you are writing because you're an actor, not necessarily for yourself, but just you know, what actors like to say.
You know what sounds good coming out of an actor's mouth.
So can you I assume you can't switch off the actor side of you when you're writing because you know what it's going to sound like?
Yeah, I write completely as an actor. So once it gets to a certain stage, I'm playing all the parts as I write and it's thrilling.
I can be absolutely anyone.
I always thought I was versatile, but, you know, I can play a child or a man or I can do anything, which actually now everyone can do comedy.
But I play all the roles. I do some really dodgy accents because I do quite a lot of international parts.
And, um, but but I'm on my own, so it's okay.
It's just to get the rhythm of the tune of the accent.
But yes, I always write as an actor and I, I do know how, you know, you can tell clunky language if it does, if it's not easy to say, you can tell.
But I think it all comes from story and character.
So it's not necessarily how it comes out of the actor's mouth, but it's if there's story and character and a reason for saying these words.
And I'm a it's the thought between the words actually that you don't write, but you need to know what the thought is from one sentence to the next.
And then you know that you're on to a proper dialogue or monologue or whatever it is.
And it seems as if and I suppose one doesn't want to jump the gun. But obviously, you know, I read kind of the industry response to things.
And from the very beginning with Life of Pi, there was talk about, you know,
after the buzz in Sheffield, in the reviews, there was talk about, you know, Western opening batsman.
And when The Daily Mail this is the new big thing, you know, move over The Lion King.
It's going to go to Broadway. And I don't know if they can make a movie.
I think it's already been a movie. But how has that palpably changed your life?
Are you getting offered different things? Do you now have the luxury perhaps of saying no?
What difference does it make to you? It's definitely put me on the map in terms of not being a one time, one time hit, you know?
Oh, she did something else. She wrote another thing. And yeah, it has it's completely changed.
I mean, but doing these epic things like Life of Pi and Invisible Cities,
bigger projects are coming to me, which is really exciting because it's lovely writing on a big scale.
And and, you know, you still keep budget in mind, but to have to do what Leo said,
think the impossible and we'll make it happen because actually theatrically, you can make anything happen in a black box.
You can make the world explode. You don't need to see it explode. But if you put the intention right, you can do it.
And it's given me the luxury of with him, you know, saying I want to write something small, I want to write something intimate.
I want to come away from that and write something that is a virtuosic piece for two actors who I know are extraordinary.
It gave me that doorway.
And do you feel as an actor, I mean, it there's just a sense that maybe things are a bit more fluid, a bit more open than there might have been.
Definitely back when you were doing free, outgoing, definite, you know,
Glenda Jackson played King are not saying you need to play your bit young for that.
I mean, do you feel now that there are more options available to you than there might have been ten or twenty years ago?
Absolutely. Definitely. The world has changed, let alone the pandemic, the BLM movement,
everything that's happened in this last year when we've been locked away has shaken, I would say, all of us and shaken our world view.
And I think young people are saying no to so many things that were in place.
And they're right. You know, it's time to reinvent, rethink,
but it doesn't mean we have to throw the classics out and we have to throw the things that we did out before.
We just have to find a new way of telling them that is relevant to us now, which is the whole.
The point of all art, and if you can't do that, then why do it?
You know, so I think it's really exciting. Yeah, and there are so many more.
Well, I think there are a lot more female writers. I don't know if there are, but I feel like in the last few years, female directors,
people of colour, I think that there's a we can that there's been a window of we need it.
There are people doing it because they've been a lot of us quite long in the tooth and have been around for a while.
And so people are coming to it because they think, oh, this is a career I could do.
How much of all this trajectory, though, really takes you by surprise?
In other words, when you got to Rodder, for instance, is there any provision for wanting to write or I mean, it's an acting academy.
Yeah. Do you have writing classes? Yes, we did. We had playwriting classes that were about analysis.
But also we did we had a term of writing Lloyd Trott's, who still teaches at RADA.
We have playwriting classes with him.
And he he brought in a writer who taught us and I remember the exercises that stuck with me for a term he taught us and he sent us out and he said,
listen to a conversation on the tube or in a shop or whatever it is, listen to a conversation,
write it down as accurately as you can, cast your fellow classmates and then direct them in that conversation.
And it's such a it's a basic writing exercise to just get reality and accuracy and character in language.
So, yes, absolutely rather didn't. I mean, it is an acting training completely.
But if you have and especially now, I think that's really expanded because acting and writing,
they're they're encouraging, diversifying your talents and using everything you have, which is brilliant.
And I guess there were avenues it wasn't as clear because I didn't know I was a writer when I was a writer.
So you weren't writing kind of no scenes for your classmates? No.
Although the last play I did, which we do as public performance for agents and directors to come and watch us and hopefully hire us wasn't terrible.
It was a terrible, terrible forehand. And we were all appalled that this was our last show.
It was awful writing. So I literally every night went home and rewrote the scene and I had never written anything in my life.
I thought it can't be any worse than what this thing is. And if this is meant to show off our talents, it's not good enough.
So on my own, I might have been a typewriter. I mean, it was 1990, you know, it's a long time ago.
I can't remember if it was maybe a computer, but I brought in a scene each day and I rewrote the play.
I love it. I get credit for it. Do you remember? I don't think I could.
It is quite a big writer, but it was a terrible thing when I read it.
Yes, it's been sharpened. I was that good.
But in fact, I was wondering, following on from that, as an actor for hire now by other playwrights,
do you think the parents are going to think, I'm not sure about her because she's going to go home and sort of rewrite my script?
And actually, I wanted to say what I wrote. Yeah, there absolutely. I have to be I have to put my writer head away.
But I'm also extremely respectful of the writers because I think, my God, I can come in here and go, no, I wouldn't say that.
But you spent years working out what I would say. And so I'm very dogged about learning the lines I'm given.
And if they're not, if they don't make sense because there's something that they've missed, I will respectfully offer it through the right channels.
But what about because, you know, you do film and television.
And of course, the adage about screen is that we say films aren't written, they're rewritten because everything gets tweaked at the last minute.
Or sometimes you've got a star who just says, I'm going to say whatever I want to say and who cares what the script says.
So what happens on a film set? Is it just a kind of free for all?
I don't do film very much, but on TV some some of them are much more relaxed and some of them are dogged about the lines.
So you just have to see what the rules are and that particular one and and play by their rules.
But I am very respectful because there's nothing worse. I mean, we're all where we're all in it together.
Right. And we're all it takes a long time for anything to get made.
And when you do, that's a time for celebration. And I often feel when I'm writing and I'm in the rehearsal room, it's a fabulously collaborative time,
but everybody's literally shaking you to get the best out of you.
It's quite exhausting because they're going like this doesn't make sense.
That doesn't work. We need to and ultimately it makes the project better.
But it is hard. So I'm really I know what the writer is going through when someone goes, I wouldn't say that, you know, well, then offer something.
What would you say? And why wouldn't you say it as opposed to I don't like it.
So easy to blame the lines. Yeah, well, that must be interesting because I'm sure it's not.
You've been part of many a cast where at the end of the days you say,
let's all go off to the pub and dis the writer and now you know that you're the one who's being dis.
Yeah. So you can play both sides of the equation. Was it always a no brainer that you would go into the theatre?
Did you have some sort of other career percolating when you were young? No, I was always going to be an actor once I worked out what it is.
I liked drama, but but once I worked out this.
Could be a job I was always going to be. And when did you work that out? I think I was six six.
OK, that's pretty good. Yeah, I was six, but my dad found out when I was 14.
I then went, oh, never mind, you'll grow out of that. And then and then I didn't.
But he was pretty glad when you got to Toronto. Yes, he was.
He didn't know what it was to start with. And then, um, because I was gonna go to university and my drama teacher said, try, just try.
And I thought, I'm never going to get it. I'll have a go. And then the first audition, I was in love with it.
I thought, oh, my God, you could do theatre all day. All day.
They teach you fencing and voice. And I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing.
And so by the third audition, the third record, I want to get in.
And when I did get in, I said to my dad, I got into Rada and then he's a he's a surgeon.
So he went to the theatre, see the other theatre, and he was doing an operation.
And the nurses he told his colleagues that I'd gotten into Rada and they were like, oh, that's.
Think if I knew it and then he changed his mind, yes, you can go so from one theatre to the other.
Yeah, totally. Yes, absolutely. We've got some great questions coming in with the other questions.
So one person wants to know, what do you really want to adapt for theatre?
I mean, it sounds like you got other things that you'd love to get your hands on.
You know, I'm doing them so and I can't talk about them until until they're out there.
But I only pick things that I want to do.
It's the luxury of being an actor. What do you think draws you to the things that is hard to know what the hook is?
Actually, I haven't quite worked it out, but I know when I get the hook because I don't know, it's an instinctive, immediate thing.
And there's some I've been approached with some amazing projects, but I haven't had the hook.
And so I think, well, yes, I could do it. But the luxury, you know, it's it's really nice that I can just take so long to write anything.
You know, it takes two years or more. So you really and I need something that will keep me coming back.
So I need that hook. So to some extent, in, I think some red velvet,
this talk about what makes an important play is that that's something I wanted to be important in some way to you, to other people.
It needs to move. You need to have a good time.
So I'm a big fan of theatre that is enjoyment, not endurance, because I think we come out to have a good time.
Right. That is ultimately the point is it's entertainment. But if I can make you feel and that can be laughter or crying or anything,
I want to give you a good story where you get immersed and you travel and you feel and I love truth.
Humanity. Yeah.
And somebody else, as he mentioned, working with a Bollywood composer with you.
Imagine working on musicals at some stage, too. Yes, I'd love to do a musical, actually, and especially having a husband who can do it.
Yeah, you can do all. I did have an idea for a musical that hasn't had it far and found its place yet, but my agent says, wait, just wait.
And she's right because actually you push an idea and it goes nowhere.
And then a few years later, a door opens. So you get a sense of there's I mean, like with red velvet, it suddenly arrived at just the right moment.
Is there a sense that have you got an instinct for that?
You realise speaks to that moment that when things will arrive? Oh, no, not at all.
I wish I did. That would be brilliant. Then I'll just be working constantly. I wish I did know.
I've got a story that I worked on for 20 years and and it's a true story.
And it's about a murder that happened in nineteen sixty that my dad was involved in.
And I've written it as a film. I've invented it as a TV.
I've gone through so many companies to make it into a TV three parter and everyone goes, oh it's brilliant.
What a fabulous story. No. So but now twenty years later, theatres are interested in it and and it feels like it's not easy.
I have to write it, but but it's there. And so if I'd known 20 years ago I had to wait, then maybe it would be easier.
But no, I didn't know. How does it feel like a real transformation, thinking of writing it now for theatre when you'd been seeing it as something.
Yeah. Screen. Yeah, but I like writing across every genre.
I like it because there's such different disciplines and I work in all of them. I don't as an actor I haven't done very much film, I've done a bit.
But I mean I've adapted Red Velvet into a film and it's it's brilliant to write
for these different forms because it demands different storytelling skills.
What do you feel are the essential different storytelling skills for each theatre?
Is all relationship. TV is story, story, story, story.
Get on. Where are we going? What are we going to go somewhere exciting and film is.
Film is a bit more of an auteur ship of. Scale, you can tell scale, but you can tell such detail in it, because I don't need to make you say anything,
I just need to give you a setting that tells me what you're feeling.
So it's not about dialogue. It's about the whole picture.
Um, we have another question is what do you think the outlook is, the drama students graduating this year and.
Yeah, it's been so tough, I feel anybody who's under 23, 24 and an education of any time from age four upwards, I think how hard is this time?
It's interesting, actually, because although it's probably felt really hard, how can you do drama on a zoom?
How can you do a movement class and a fencing class on a zoom? But there is the thing about our industry is not adaptation as in books,
but you adapt to the different situations and that adaptation creates something new.
And I think that drama students will have been hungry as we've all been hungry to do.
What you want to do will hopefully have been reading and we've all been watching.
If we're not drama students, we will all be watching TV but stories and imagining who what we can play,
what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses. And the industry is hungry for young people.
It just is. You need the next you need the next person who's going to replace the person before it's just how it works.
So I don't think they'll it's going to be hard because so many theatres and and companies will be struggling financially.
But there will be other innovative ways that people are telling stories.
And there is this absolute you know, like Rada I'm still involved with RADA are very much about diversify.
Right. Act, direct, sing, dance. If you've got the skills, go for it.
And I think that is going to bring about a whole new kind of type of performer.
And Madeline says, do you do any research when doing or adaptations, whether it's funny, Alexander Hamlett, it's a little leucovorin.
And does your research change if you are acting or writing so completely predicting a huge
amount of research for things like completely our old and different kinds of research?
Oh, my God. Are you ever wary of research? No, I love this research.
Fabulous. Because truth is so much more interesting than fiction and the detail you get from truth in the film of Red Velvet,
I've put Edmund Kean back in because he was originally in a draught, but he didn't serve the narrative of the state yet.
So he's off stage. But in the film, I put him back in as a character and I was just rereading all my research for the film and oh, it's brilliant.
Edmund Kean used to ride a horse everywhere and he used to ride it up the stairs into Drury Lane Theatre and his horse was called Shylock.
Now, who would have to say that? What is it that's got to be there?
I mean, you just think, oh, I can't imagine. You could not.
And he was he was a he was a fabulous, amazing actor and a drunk, amazing drunk on the horse going.
Exactly. Exactly. Called Shylock.
What we know is I don't know if that's right to call him Shylock on a film, but I just think how could you I would never imagine that.
So I love research. I do much more research as a writer than an actor.
As an actor, I'm responding more to just one part. And if there's anything that I'm talking about, then I need to know what it is.
So I'll look those things up.
But it's much more instinctive as an actor in terms of why am I saying this in this situation and what should I know, what context am I in?
But as a writer, I yeah, I research all the time, even down to in red velvet.
They're having tea constantly, I thought, did they have milk and tea.
So I Googled and I found out that China was so, such a nerdy thing.
I become a real nut. China was so thin that if you put hot tea in it, it might crack.
So you put your milk in first and then and they did if it wouldn't crack.
So in eighteen thirty three, that is how they have to. So now we know why we go there.
We only find China. There we go. Brilliant.
Have you ever found something out that's been really unhelpful. Yes, and then you have to work around it for your storytelling.
So I found out for Red Velvet that I had met, had played with Charles,
came in in Belfast in 1829, and the play is set in 80, I think twenty nine or thirty one.
And then he meets Charles in my play in 1833. And Charles doesn't play with him.
And Charles is not meant to know that he's a black actor. How do I get past that?
If actually he actually met him and played and in this version he's saying I won't play with him and I didn't know he was black.
So Adrian said to me, you have to make it fit the facts, which I can't.
I can't. How do I just pretend that it's not there?
And he said, but people will know that they played together in 18, 20 whenever it was, and then it negates this part of the story.
So I kind of gave in after months of like I gave in and I've worked out a way to tell the story.
And I basically Charles was meant in my story.
Charles, the playbills were printed, but Charles was ill, so he didn't turn up.
So he never, never he thinks that he played it. But, you know, I said, well, I have invented.
And who's going to say this funny lately? We're going with the version.
It's also a question about what what kind of involvement do you have when one of
your plays transfers like for Manchester or Birmingham ever to the West End?
So when Invisible Cities went from Manchester to Brisbane, sadly, I wasn't asked to Brisbane and it was the same production.
So I was unnecessary. I mean, the writer, if the writer is necessary, you go with it.
But in something like that, it was written and ready and done with Life of Pi.
I will be no, I'm completely involved. So involved in any casting in any decisions because the space has changed.
So the script might need to change to suit it. So but I'll be in rehearsals less so when we did it in Sheffield, I was in rehearsals every day,
but when I was invisible cities in this one, I'll, I'll be there intermittently but on the end of a phone if I need to do anything.
And in previews, previews are really important.
So I'll watch every preview so that then you can just do the tweaks because once you see it up and running with the audience,
which is the extra telling of what the story is, then you need to change it and shift things about.
And how's that been? So with him where you didn't have an audience or not there.
So you can feel it at the time. Yeah. So how does it feel we had to do it.
How different.
Yeah, we had to do it the other way round so that the two actors hammered the script, as did the director and Rippert and staff at the Almeda.
You know, everybody went to the script and I changed it, changed it, changed it.
And then and then we just did it. Yeah, we just did it.
And I mean, it's that thing of making it a chocolate.
It needs to be something that's enjoyable. And you take the whole thing and it's wonderful.
It doesn't outstay. It's welcome. So length was really important.
I'm going to make a couple of little tweaks and changes when we hopefully get to do it live again,
because then you see how it's working and then you can just change it a little bit to make it better.
Have you got a real hunger for that being doing the work with the with the sound of people responding?
Yeah, there were bits that I wrote literally for audiences, you know, and, uh, and they don't work when there's no audience.
So the actors are just with each other, you know, or on their own.
And without that hum of how people respond when they pick up on something or they laugh, you know, that sense to hear that is is love.
I think it's extraordinary at the end of the streaming of him where the Adrian and Danny Bough.
Yeah, but of course. Yeah. They're not bowing to the thunderous applause that we are giving them through a screen.
So it'll be lovely to do that in. Yes. And get the applause. Yeah.
Yeah. Those are the moments you feel sort of breath when you can't say thank you.
And if it's part of the experience it can be an experience. Yeah.
It's us being vital as audience. You think you're important. Yeah, right.
Right. But when audiences audience, you have to play your part.
And there's a question, really important question is what is the first play you will go and see?
And this is for you as Matt as well. When we can go to theatres, what's like what will be on on if you got a you can actually do it.
Yes, it's my, you know, life and it's a play called Herding Cats.
I listen to Coxon and it's coming next week to the Soho Theatre in Soho and it's only, I think, four, five per.
Promises, but it's got a very interesting trick to this version of it.
There are three characters in the play and in this version of it, two of the actors will be in the room at the Soho Theatre in front of us.
And the third actor, Greg Sherman, will be appearing simultaneously.
I mean, [INAUDIBLE] be part of the cast, but beamed in from L.A., which is eight hours earlier.
So it'll be seven thirty U.K. time in the evening at eleven.
Thirty in the morning. I wonder if they'll black out the windows so that he's in the same time frame he's in the evening,
because that's very strange if he's in daylight, unless he's meant to be an American.
And also, of course, I don't know, the place will be looking to see to what extent maybe that is allowed by the narrative.
Maybe he's a character. He's an outsider. Yeah, that's one [INAUDIBLE] of a way to be an outsider.
Also, if they're ready for the ad libbing and improvising built in for when the Internet connexion goes well,
for sure, the understudy is sitting in the third row and the.
Have you got a top of the list go to. The life of Pi is obviously visible right there.
Yes, and then there's a couple of other things that I'm going to be involved in, but they're not announced yet.
So I can't I can't say anything. What are you a play go with?
I mean, do you like going to the theatre just to do kind of free night where you just go to see something?
Because I have got kids who are older now. I haven't been that free to just do it easily.
But yes, with planning, I've definitely gone once or twice a week, not nowhere near as much as you have to.
Twice a week is a lot. Yeah. Yes, definitely. I like it. You have to you can't write for the theatre and not see spaces and people and writing and.
Well the news out there is. Yeah. And to see how stories work and know.
Yeah I do get a last question that's come in then we are going to be totally over time.
Is the curriculum in schools and universities in the right place or going in the right direction to support theatre in the arts.
So I don't know anything about the curriculum in schools and universities other than cuts are being, um.
Pushed, so if you're cutting the arts, no. What do you think we should be doing?
What would you love to see? What kind of directions do you think we should be celebrating?
Writing, acting, dance? Doesn't matter if you can do it or not.
It's about confidence. It's it it assists performance and understanding.
Performance assists you in all elements of your life, being able to imagine being in someone else's shoes, being able to see what a story does,
whether you think you're into the arts or not,
you're reading books or watching TV or playing video games which have stories, you know, story surrounds us and we need it.
So it is about respecting it actually, let alone the amount of money that we bring into the country.
So to put it in its rightful place, it is as valuable as the sciences in the maths and the humanities, all the different subjects that we do.
It's essential to our existence, which is, I think, what has really been shown in the pandemic where we've all been locked away.
And if you don't encourage the makers of the future.
What are you doing? Absolutely. Thank you.
Thank you. That was just wonderful. Thank you all for sending wonderful questions.
Thank you for joining us. Here is two theatres opening to us bring together and a proper full funding to the arts.
We love the Culture Recovery Fund. Keep it there and keep supporting the arts in the universities and in schools and so on.
And thank you to the Torch and Story Museum for setting this up.
On the twenty seventh of May, we have Alice Oswald giving the professor poetry lecture.
So maybe reconvening with everybody online again then.
But stay safe and thank you.