1 00:00:06,400 --> 00:00:16,260 Welcome, everyone, to Big Tent, Big Ideas. The live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme. 2 00:00:16,260 --> 00:00:21,990 Big tent, big ideas is our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students, 3 00:00:21,990 --> 00:00:29,280 performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines and from the arts and creative sectors. 4 00:00:29,280 --> 00:00:35,040 We'll explore important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment, 5 00:00:35,040 --> 00:00:40,830 medical, humanities, ethics and A.I., the public, the private and the common good. 6 00:00:40,830 --> 00:00:46,010 And we will celebrate storytelling and music, performance and identity. 7 00:00:46,010 --> 00:00:51,080 Everyone is welcome in our big tent. So this is also a celebration of community. 8 00:00:51,080 --> 00:01:00,890 Please make yourself metaphorically as well as literally at home this evening as we explore big ideas generated by Shakespeare's work together. 9 00:01:00,890 --> 00:01:06,860 We're bringing you this event programme online to complement social distance with creative connexions. 10 00:01:06,860 --> 00:01:10,850 We hope that you're all safe and well during this difficult time. 11 00:01:10,850 --> 00:01:16,400 Tonight was to have been the opening night of our first big tent festival here in Oxford. 12 00:01:16,400 --> 00:01:22,610 It would have taken place in an actual big tent on the site of what at the moment is a big patch of mud, 13 00:01:22,610 --> 00:01:30,880 but will one day be the new Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities. Today is also, as many of you will know, Shakespeare's birthday. 14 00:01:30,880 --> 00:01:40,300 And so it's my great pleasure and honour to host this discussion between Emma Smith and Erika Wyman to intensely engage scholars 15 00:01:40,300 --> 00:01:49,240 and practitioners of theatre and of the public philosophical and political dimension of Shakespeare's work in particular. 16 00:01:49,240 --> 00:01:56,600 Welcome, Emma. And welcome, Erika. I'll embarrass them both by saying a little bit more about them, 17 00:01:56,600 --> 00:02:02,960 their work and why we thought it would be good to bring them together this evening before we start the discussion. 18 00:02:02,960 --> 00:02:08,390 I should also say that if you would like to put forward any questions to us, because during the event tonight, 19 00:02:08,390 --> 00:02:14,750 please just pop them in the comments box on YouTube and we'll answer as many as possible in the Q&A at the end of the discussion. 20 00:02:14,750 --> 00:02:21,050 In other words, in around half an hour's time. So first to Emma. 21 00:02:21,050 --> 00:02:30,650 Emma Smith is tutorial fellow in English. Fellow librarian Hertford College and professor of Shakespeare Studies here at the University of Oxford. 22 00:02:30,650 --> 00:02:36,360 Professor Smith's research combines a range of approaches to Shakespeare and early modern drama. 23 00:02:36,360 --> 00:02:44,510 A recent work has been about the reception of Shakespeare and about scholarly and cultural investments in Shakespearean criticism. 24 00:02:44,510 --> 00:02:51,100 This is Shakespeare. How to Read The World's Greatest Playwright is her latest publication just out. 25 00:02:51,100 --> 00:02:55,860 Now. The book has earned fine praise from many readers. 26 00:02:55,860 --> 00:03:01,260 Alex Preston in The Observer calls it, quote, the best introduction to the place I read. 27 00:03:01,260 --> 00:03:04,940 Perhaps the best book on Shakespeare. Full stop. 28 00:03:04,940 --> 00:03:14,990 For as he goes on to say Emmas work is, quote, again, a model of unpretentious, deeply researched, profoundly approachable criticism. 29 00:03:14,990 --> 00:03:18,220 We are another wedge in for a treat this evening. 30 00:03:18,220 --> 00:03:26,260 All the more so since Emma will be joined by Erica Wineman, deputy artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 31 00:03:26,260 --> 00:03:34,480 Erica joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in January 2013, bringing with her many years of experience in the theatre across the UK. 32 00:03:34,480 --> 00:03:39,190 She works closely with the RSPCA artistic director Gregory Doran on all aspects 33 00:03:39,190 --> 00:03:43,690 of artistic strategy and takes a particular lead on the development of new work, 34 00:03:43,690 --> 00:03:49,260 the contemporary relevance of the repertoire and the national ambitions of the company. 35 00:03:49,260 --> 00:03:54,930 Erica led the team, which opened the other place or reopened the other place in March 2016. 36 00:03:54,930 --> 00:03:59,520 A creative hub dedicated to daring theatrical exploration. 37 00:03:59,520 --> 00:04:09,540 She takes a lead on extending access, equality and diversity across all RSG activities and is passionate about participation in theatre making. 38 00:04:09,540 --> 00:04:12,750 In fact, this has been a longstanding commitment in Erica's life. 39 00:04:12,750 --> 00:04:17,670 Is clear to anyone who has witnessed her properly groundbreaking collaborative work at any stage of her 40 00:04:17,670 --> 00:04:23,230 creative journey from her time here at Oxford studying French and philosophy to the Southern Playhouse. 41 00:04:23,230 --> 00:04:29,550 The gate in Notting Hill, northern stage in Newcastle and now the RISC. 42 00:04:29,550 --> 00:04:37,480 Now, both America and Emma have had recently or recent Shakespeare events cancelled Erica's production 43 00:04:37,480 --> 00:04:42,370 of The Winter's Tale for the Royal Shakespeare Company and launch events for Emma's book. 44 00:04:42,370 --> 00:04:46,330 This is Shakespeare have been for now lost. 45 00:04:46,330 --> 00:04:52,510 So this evening in this big tent, big ideas conversation, Erica and I might discuss their respective productions, 46 00:04:52,510 --> 00:04:59,020 their hopes for them and for the thinking, the research and the practical experimentation that they embody. 47 00:04:59,020 --> 00:05:06,520 But as well as acknowledging loss, they also discuss what Shakespeare can offer us both now and for the future. 48 00:05:06,520 --> 00:05:13,750 So without further ado, I'll disappear from your screens and hand over to Emma to start the discussion proper. 49 00:05:13,750 --> 00:05:18,340 Emma. Thank you. Thanks so much was. 50 00:05:18,340 --> 00:05:23,840 And thanks, everybody, for joining us. Erica, it's brilliant to be able to have this conversation. 51 00:05:23,840 --> 00:05:29,020 And I was just thinking this would probably be week two of the Winter's Tale, wouldn't it? 52 00:05:29,020 --> 00:05:36,410 If if you'd been running to your schedule, where would you be at now in that in the soft life of that production? 53 00:05:36,410 --> 00:05:41,410 Well, I suppose we were really looking forward to Shakespeare's birthday because it's a very special day in Stratford. 54 00:05:41,410 --> 00:05:45,140 So sometimes I've had to open a show on Shakespeare's birthday. 55 00:05:45,140 --> 00:05:52,040 That's a bit too much pressure. So we, too, would have been lovely because we'd have got through our press night and settled into the run. 56 00:05:52,040 --> 00:05:57,080 And we're starting to look forward to the glorious summer on the stages. 57 00:05:57,080 --> 00:06:01,310 I should say that we are still looking forward to getting on stage, on stage. 58 00:06:01,310 --> 00:06:06,920 It hasn't disappeared from view, but we don't know when. So, yeah, I miss it very much. 59 00:06:06,920 --> 00:06:13,190 You've done a really important, hugely important part of the work, which is that long rehearsal period, 60 00:06:13,190 --> 00:06:18,470 which you most of which you must have just about got in before lock down. 61 00:06:18,470 --> 00:06:24,860 Tell me a bit about what what was it what emerged about the play from that period of working late? 62 00:06:24,860 --> 00:06:27,170 Well, it was a very happy process. 63 00:06:27,170 --> 00:06:35,150 I mean, a very rich one and often very demanding intellectually and emotionally, because the play asks so much of the automakers. 64 00:06:35,150 --> 00:06:43,940 But we discovered lots of things. I started out with a kind of provocation to the company that I thought would be interesting to live cuts, 65 00:06:43,940 --> 00:06:53,570 times and places that that brought out of the play. Well, I now sought to be some really timely power relationships. 66 00:06:53,570 --> 00:06:59,570 I suppose I could see I could see in the play the sense of how a man loses his perspective. 67 00:06:59,570 --> 00:07:09,040 And indeed, I think in some ways his mind in service of his need to feel in control and how that resonated politically very strongly. 68 00:07:09,040 --> 00:07:15,350 And so I'd made a decision before we started rehearsals that I wouldn't set it right now because I felt that in a way 69 00:07:15,350 --> 00:07:22,820 would reduce the complexity and kind of gorgeousness of the plan also would make the 16 year gap really challenging. 70 00:07:22,820 --> 00:07:24,590 What does now mean? 71 00:07:24,590 --> 00:07:34,850 So we got interested in 1950, Spain for Cecillia, and we got really interested in a late 1960s, the northeast coast of England for Bohemia, 72 00:07:34,850 --> 00:07:43,800 sort of partly riffing on what I think is quite perverse and delightful and what Shakespeare has done with those two places and sort of, 73 00:07:43,800 --> 00:07:50,000 you know, surprise wanting to surprise people with that and really wanting to avoid a kind of conventional pastoral, 74 00:07:50,000 --> 00:08:00,200 because I find the play doesn't have as much power as is in the text when it's it's reduced to something sort of gentle and idyllic. 75 00:08:00,200 --> 00:08:08,950 I think he writes about places that know about sheep rearing its real work and sees importance and song and dance are important anyway. 76 00:08:08,950 --> 00:08:18,500 The so we explore those things. But I didn't have a solution to perhaps the most famous line on the page except see by bear. 77 00:08:18,500 --> 00:08:22,790 And so a lot of the discoveries were about how of course. 78 00:08:22,790 --> 00:08:27,360 How do you how do you join those two worlds? 79 00:08:27,360 --> 00:08:32,240 And in a sense that it is not moments that Shakespeare provokes us to say. 80 00:08:32,240 --> 00:08:38,240 And now what? What do you expect? And so we got very interested in them. 81 00:08:38,240 --> 00:08:44,870 The women in the play. I mean, it is a play that's got these wonderful women that come to the fore. 82 00:08:44,870 --> 00:08:46,640 Actually, earlier on then people noticed, 83 00:08:46,640 --> 00:08:55,370 I think we were left at the end of three with this terrible sense of injustice towards the women that pool owners articulated so brilliantly. 84 00:08:55,370 --> 00:08:59,570 And it's tricky this because I don't want to give away exactly what we've come up with for the barber. 85 00:08:59,570 --> 00:09:09,920 We we started to find a way that what I'm taking us faces in at three scenes three is is is really her mind. 86 00:09:09,920 --> 00:09:18,270 That's what he's battling with. He's had this amazing vision for mining, which, of course, if you know what happens, is rather peculiar. 87 00:09:18,270 --> 00:09:25,500 And and we got excited by what it might mean if her mining spirit was guiding the next set of events. 88 00:09:25,500 --> 00:09:32,970 So in a way to take take, I'm taking a sick instinct seriously. So the women can take that back seriously and play rate recklessly. 89 00:09:32,970 --> 00:09:40,680 Yeah, I understand. Of all the awful I mean, awful in its real sense, like sort of frightening and inspiring. 90 00:09:40,680 --> 00:09:49,260 Not not that's not a comedy moment, is it? That's not I don't think it is always sort of in danger of tipping into. 91 00:09:49,260 --> 00:09:58,200 Yeah, that's exactly. I don't think it is. I don't think it's absurd. I think he I think Shakespeare builds this sense of. 92 00:09:58,200 --> 00:10:04,930 But the gods. What the gods are going to do. And the sense that the vengeance hasn't dropped down yet. 93 00:10:04,930 --> 00:10:11,800 And I got I got excited by the fact that the next thing we see in here is an taken of wrestling 94 00:10:11,800 --> 00:10:17,350 with questions of of of faith and belief that he doesn't want to believe this preposterous dream. 95 00:10:17,350 --> 00:10:25,600 But he does believe it in this moment. He does believe it. And what he the conclusion he comes to is that he's the kind of. 96 00:10:25,600 --> 00:10:32,210 Jesus figure, I mean, exactly as you park there, then the mischief around religion is really present. 97 00:10:32,210 --> 00:10:35,380 You know, it's one moment where the follow the next minute we've got somebody who needs 98 00:10:35,380 --> 00:10:40,280 to sacrifice themselves in quite a kind of Christian way for the greater good. 99 00:10:40,280 --> 00:10:49,930 And so I was interested in taking it really seriously. So, yeah, he is taking us is not treated kindly by the bar. 100 00:10:49,930 --> 00:10:52,480 But there's more of a kind of food chain quality to it. 101 00:10:52,480 --> 00:10:57,730 We got interested and we learnt we learnt a lot about female bears that are really frightening. 102 00:10:57,730 --> 00:11:04,810 The advice, apparently those people who have to live near bears is if you've got a mother back, you basically just think it's over. 103 00:11:04,810 --> 00:11:16,630 There's nothing you can do. So that was useful to us in trying to understand how one half of the play opens the space for the next half. 104 00:11:16,630 --> 00:11:20,830 I was just reading a book about deaths in Shakespeareans and which had a lot 105 00:11:20,830 --> 00:11:24,890 of very practical sort of information about poisons and that kind of thing. 106 00:11:24,890 --> 00:11:29,480 And one of the things it said was this should not have run away from the bad. 107 00:11:29,480 --> 00:11:35,890 He should have backed away very, very slowly that running away, that makes the bad run, you know, that causes the bad to run, run, run nasty. 108 00:11:35,890 --> 00:11:41,560 But also quite interesting about the extent to which it didn't. 109 00:11:41,560 --> 00:11:46,240 The extent to which this is just a sort of eruption from completely outside the world 110 00:11:46,240 --> 00:11:50,760 of the play and the extent to which it's actually or always been there in some way. 111 00:11:50,760 --> 00:11:54,630 It's it's it's brewed up by the passions of the play. 112 00:11:54,630 --> 00:11:59,550 It's not a. I think people have enjoyed the state's station because it seems so random. 113 00:11:59,550 --> 00:12:03,270 Yes, it pursuit, particularly exit pursued by a bear. 114 00:12:03,270 --> 00:12:05,180 It's the aid that's run the business. 115 00:12:05,180 --> 00:12:11,040 If it works issued by the bear, it would already have been a bit sort of domesticated somehow because we would know, 116 00:12:11,040 --> 00:12:15,210 yeah, there was a bear and that's what he's going to do. What bears? One of the things bears do. 117 00:12:15,210 --> 00:12:22,650 But I suppose the thing that we found way use for rehearsals was thinking about fairytale and not 118 00:12:22,650 --> 00:12:28,900 not in the perhaps the sort of conventional theatrical sense of it being preposterous that almost. 119 00:12:28,900 --> 00:12:35,680 If you look at it through the eyes of a child, actually the great thing about fairy tales is you is the unexpected. 120 00:12:35,680 --> 00:12:38,470 But that doesn't mean it's not psychologically justified. 121 00:12:38,470 --> 00:12:46,000 So I think the thread we started to find was that what chanteys does is put in in train a set 122 00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:55,340 of events that will lead to the extreme unexpected because it's about it's about control. 123 00:12:55,340 --> 00:13:05,830 So certainly that's a reading born of our time about a man who has has become very insecure about his his ability to be a leader, to be a king. 124 00:13:05,830 --> 00:13:12,970 And that manifests itself, of course, in his relationships. But actually immediately it gets sort of spread around the court, the notion of truth. 125 00:13:12,970 --> 00:13:20,080 So we kept talking in the early parts of rehearsals about the nightmare of truth collapsing because it happens almost every scene. 126 00:13:20,080 --> 00:13:25,740 And up to that, more versions of what truth might be just sort of walls fall down. 127 00:13:25,740 --> 00:13:34,390 Not that we we started to get excited that the vengeance or the counterpoint to that is that he isn't in any sense in control. 128 00:13:34,390 --> 00:13:44,740 None of us are as knows as so many Shakespeare's great characters find out that actually you have to surrender to something. 129 00:13:44,740 --> 00:13:53,410 And I think the fairest part of that. I mean, we've made a connexion to something that is embodied by by her mind or her mind, a spirit. 130 00:13:53,410 --> 00:13:58,690 But really, it goes beyond anything earthly. To something we can't control. 131 00:13:58,690 --> 00:13:59,770 That's so interesting. 132 00:13:59,770 --> 00:14:05,390 So just I mean, not necessarily a you to give away the end of your production at all, because we're all really looking forward to seeing that. 133 00:14:05,390 --> 00:14:13,570 But do you feel does look doesn't counties get control back or just does he. 134 00:14:13,570 --> 00:14:21,290 Does he settle himself to the fact that he doesn't have control? That's one of things I've always been really fascinated in about the end of the play. 135 00:14:21,290 --> 00:14:28,400 Is on the one hand, it seems to suggest you put things right by going backwards and getting back something. 136 00:14:28,400 --> 00:14:35,780 And on the other hand, it seems to suggest you put things right by going forwards. And it's it's the next generation who can sort this out. 137 00:14:35,780 --> 00:14:39,920 It's going to. This is we have to just see the ground now to Pettit's and Floras Allende. 138 00:14:39,920 --> 00:14:43,530 You know, young hearts run free. Don't mess up like my Manami kind of thing. 139 00:14:43,530 --> 00:14:48,950 That would be that by sort of inciting for that part of the play. 140 00:14:48,950 --> 00:14:56,690 But both at both the present Shakespeare's Scott Shakespeare or loyalties or the play or something has got one foot 141 00:14:56,690 --> 00:15:02,030 in the idea of the past is the place to get back to and one foot in the idea that somehow that is the present. 142 00:15:02,030 --> 00:15:07,680 I feel that's a very kind of strange thing about the ending. Yeah, I, I do recognise that. 143 00:15:07,680 --> 00:15:12,620 And we've talked a lot about that in particular around the relationship between perplexities 90s, 144 00:15:12,620 --> 00:15:23,240 where there's this app that is harkening for innocence was something in their boyhood and her mind is aware of that very, very early in the play. 145 00:15:23,240 --> 00:15:25,410 This sense of if she could crack that, 146 00:15:25,410 --> 00:15:34,130 she could understand that meant maybe she could help these two men who are both, I think, in a kind of complex pain. 147 00:15:34,130 --> 00:15:37,520 But I don't think the play or in my production, 148 00:15:37,520 --> 00:15:46,150 it doesn't it doesn't work for us to think that they go back because of what happens between Pearline or allowances. 149 00:15:46,150 --> 00:15:51,730 So Rantes offers in that moment that Amani leaves the stage. 150 00:15:51,730 --> 00:15:56,830 We don't we don't know what's gonna happen to it doesn't look good in a in in three key offers, 151 00:15:56,830 --> 00:16:01,240 a kind of classical apology that focuses on the men in his life. 152 00:16:01,240 --> 00:16:10,240 Actually, you know, that is so striking the way he loves Camilla more than anyone else, 153 00:16:10,240 --> 00:16:17,650 because the betrayal of Camilla is so vivid and pulls and it comes charging on the cause take takes in the part magnificently in a way that, 154 00:16:17,650 --> 00:16:25,690 you know, is enviable. And it seems to me that what she does is, is having taken them apart. 155 00:16:25,690 --> 00:16:31,330 She then connects to the idea of grief and what it really means and something in that moment, 156 00:16:31,330 --> 00:16:41,830 something in in his response that where he asks her to lead him to where those bodies are and how he will grieve. 157 00:16:41,830 --> 00:16:46,270 I think he's going forwards into a connexion to his feelings. 158 00:16:46,270 --> 00:16:49,510 That has been the problem. Now, this is a very contemporary reading of it. 159 00:16:49,510 --> 00:16:55,030 I know. But it really held water for us. As the acting choices. 160 00:16:55,030 --> 00:16:59,620 This is a man if only he could have said I'm jealous. 161 00:16:59,620 --> 00:17:05,560 I don't I don't believe you love me anymore. And I'm not sure I'm a very good king, probably. 162 00:17:05,560 --> 00:17:11,380 That would have been a dialogue available to him to get him through without this total collapse. 163 00:17:11,380 --> 00:17:16,900 And what he does, in fact, is find a way of saying, I'm going to be sad about this forever. 164 00:17:16,900 --> 00:17:22,690 And that's a very I mean, to coin your phrase, is a very grown up thing to say. 165 00:17:22,690 --> 00:17:29,310 It doesn't seem in that moment it might be overblown. In fact, it just scratches the surface of what Paul Ayna has suggested. 166 00:17:29,310 --> 00:17:36,250 You know, thousands of you each. He says, OK, I'm going to regret this forever. 167 00:17:36,250 --> 00:17:40,690 So I think it goes forward into emotional maturity. Yeah, too. 168 00:17:40,690 --> 00:17:45,150 Too shall be my recreation or recreation yet. 169 00:17:45,150 --> 00:17:49,810 Yeah, exactly. And and also in the final scene, 170 00:17:49,810 --> 00:17:55,690 the thing that we struggled with and then peculiarly unlocks it for us when we just 171 00:17:55,690 --> 00:18:00,760 when we surrendered as a company and just did it and instead of talking about it, 172 00:18:00,760 --> 00:18:07,330 was the fact that he gives her mining allowances no lines together. 173 00:18:07,330 --> 00:18:12,920 So you got so much talking in the play and there's so much trying to unpack what they're feeling and then envy, 174 00:18:12,920 --> 00:18:20,070 if you if you like, the most critical moment of is it truly possible for them to be together again? 175 00:18:20,070 --> 00:18:24,340 He he doesn't answer that question. And I think that's really significant. 176 00:18:24,340 --> 00:18:29,440 Of course, you can make lots of choices about about rupture or impossibility. 177 00:18:29,440 --> 00:18:34,610 But actually, what we've what we are exploring and really interested in. 178 00:18:34,610 --> 00:18:42,270 Is that that is that is often the truth in human relationships, that there is too much to say and not enough to say, 179 00:18:42,270 --> 00:18:48,720 and do you just take the next step forward, a pattern of flaws that I think are also painted as not having enough answers yet? 180 00:18:48,720 --> 00:18:52,550 You know, they are they're optimists and they're idealists. 181 00:18:52,550 --> 00:19:02,010 Or he years Flora Zella's adjutants very wise and cautious, and therefore neither of them are ready. 182 00:19:02,010 --> 00:19:05,880 But the grown ups have learnt something really, really fundamental. 183 00:19:05,880 --> 00:19:13,460 Men have been vulnerable. Yeah. And that's what seems so interesting about Winter's Tale and I guess maybe the other plays of that late period, 184 00:19:13,460 --> 00:19:21,170 although it's a tragedy where we always talk about self-knowledge and characters learning something, 185 00:19:21,170 --> 00:19:31,850 but tragedies, it doesn't give them any any time to deal with that or to talk to sort of process that act differently in the future. 186 00:19:31,850 --> 00:19:35,100 It's all sort of wonderfully conflagration, Ray. 187 00:19:35,100 --> 00:19:41,660 And and poof, there they are. You know, I now I know I should have been a better king, but I'm dead. 188 00:19:41,660 --> 00:19:45,920 It's the subject is glorious. But it's not doesn't have an emotional trajectory, really. 189 00:19:45,920 --> 00:19:53,200 That seems very plausible. I think that there's something. 190 00:19:53,200 --> 00:19:57,400 There's something very you yeah, I do feel very grown up about. 191 00:19:57,400 --> 00:20:07,420 About a play which says. You really you know, you really screw up and you have to you have to live with yourself. 192 00:20:07,420 --> 00:20:11,550 That's sort of who you are. You have to find a way of living with that. 193 00:20:11,550 --> 00:20:17,910 Yes, that's right. And you are still all of the things that you have done, including the things you did before you screwed up. 194 00:20:17,910 --> 00:20:23,850 Yeah. How to try and understand that. I mean, I think there is something, of course, really, 195 00:20:23,850 --> 00:20:32,500 really magic and peculiar about the moment Atlantes meets Predator, which is is Shakespeare taking a Panopto and saying. 196 00:20:32,500 --> 00:20:38,830 Well, that's that's a bit that's a bit queasy, that's the sort the source suggests something incestuous and really troubling, 197 00:20:38,830 --> 00:20:43,300 but I don't think it's a threat of incest that he leaves. 198 00:20:43,300 --> 00:20:51,100 I think it's a thread of the young man he was because wee wee wee Joe Gluskabe plays Dantes. 199 00:20:51,100 --> 00:20:55,270 He and I talked about beginning about five. It's like he's desiccated. 200 00:20:55,270 --> 00:21:00,730 He has committed himself to grief that he's not alive. 201 00:21:00,730 --> 00:21:05,050 Shakespeare beautifully threads the coming back to life. 202 00:21:05,050 --> 00:21:10,510 And it's and in another is in another sense growing up, because it's it's about feeling desire. 203 00:21:10,510 --> 00:21:15,550 He's had no desire for 16 years because what could you desire when you have. 204 00:21:15,550 --> 00:21:19,780 When your own designs got you into such trouble and there's a desire for life, 205 00:21:19,780 --> 00:21:26,320 I think expressed in that strange moment that panics pull out and off we go. 206 00:21:26,320 --> 00:21:35,320 My great hope that they're both coming back to life in some way and that that's not just that's not just my knee hurts. 207 00:21:35,320 --> 00:21:42,400 That's just the two of them. And it's the it is the case. I think that. 208 00:21:42,400 --> 00:21:52,810 It's so particular that the moment where loyalties dismisses everybody's anxiety and says if if it is if it is madness to be found here, 209 00:21:52,810 --> 00:21:54,130 I'm not quoting Shakespeare, 210 00:21:54,130 --> 00:22:01,410 but if if if that's what if you were all suggesting that it's it's it's mental illness of some kind to want to stay here and see if she's alive, 211 00:22:01,410 --> 00:22:09,040 then that's fine by me. And that seems to be to me, a really wonderful thing to have learnt by yourself that actually this isn't madness. 212 00:22:09,040 --> 00:22:16,250 It just looks OK. Is an amazingly. 213 00:22:16,250 --> 00:22:23,540 Well, it's an amazingly contemporary play, isn't it, until become Mosso? I think one of things I'd love us to be talking about, you know, 214 00:22:23,540 --> 00:22:28,750 in a few months time is how how it's the same and different from the way you were thinking about it. 215 00:22:28,750 --> 00:22:33,770 Well, the company was thinking about it before that, because if it will come, we will we will get it. 216 00:22:33,770 --> 00:22:38,440 But it's not going to be what it would have been quite it if it had been you know, 217 00:22:38,440 --> 00:22:49,700 this opened last week just because the themes of grief and patience and seeing things out on what comes after. 218 00:22:49,700 --> 00:22:55,500 Tragedy, what comes after catastrophe you want? What do we do? What what do we do to rebuild? 219 00:22:55,500 --> 00:23:00,130 All those questions seem. I mean, just amazingly prescient. 220 00:23:00,130 --> 00:23:03,470 But we don't know. We don't have the answers either. 221 00:23:03,470 --> 00:23:10,250 No, we don't know the answers, although it has given me and the company a lot of comfort through these difficult weeks as a play. 222 00:23:10,250 --> 00:23:13,310 I feel very lucky that this is what we were doing. 223 00:23:13,310 --> 00:23:21,070 And funnily enough, on the day the theatres closed, we were bashing away at four because hydrolysed up for slightly differently. 224 00:23:21,070 --> 00:23:25,250 We've done a lot of improvisation, a lot of playing. So we sort of felt that we could do it any which way. 225 00:23:25,250 --> 00:23:32,870 We haven't settled it. And it was therefore wildly too long. Am I supposed to sort of just masturbate in Bohemia? 226 00:23:32,870 --> 00:23:40,250 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And. And, um, for us, you know, 1969, somewhere, somewhere east of Newcastle. 227 00:23:40,250 --> 00:23:48,030 And we were so nourished on that last day by. 228 00:23:48,030 --> 00:23:54,060 What the playoffs. Which is Joy. Just when you think Joy isn't so, it isn't really on the table. 229 00:23:54,060 --> 00:23:57,840 It's not totally appropriate. Come on. 230 00:23:57,840 --> 00:24:04,710 I would be hard to believe in. It just incest takes you by the hand and says, no, we're gonna do daft jokes. 231 00:24:04,710 --> 00:24:09,540 Then we're gonna dance. And or we're going to fall in love and we're gonna dance. 232 00:24:09,540 --> 00:24:16,710 Then we're gonna sing. Yeah, we're gonna do all those things properly until you forget about the tonal problem. 233 00:24:16,710 --> 00:24:22,420 And then we're gonna mention the small matter that we've got to resolve the ending. 234 00:24:22,420 --> 00:24:29,490 And it is so it's so delicious. So what's comforting is that there's a lot of talk in the theatre, 235 00:24:29,490 --> 00:24:34,570 as you can imagine, about what will audiences want or need that none of us can know. 236 00:24:34,570 --> 00:24:35,010 Of course, 237 00:24:35,010 --> 00:24:44,040 the way that gets framed is perhaps were once very bleak work that points out the vulnerabilities in our own in our own less conceptual systems. 238 00:24:44,040 --> 00:24:49,200 Perhaps we'll want to consider the tragedy that is the loss that we're all dealing with in a very real way, 239 00:24:49,200 --> 00:24:55,120 or the anxiety about loss that we're dealing with and other people saying all I'm going to want to watch is comedy. 240 00:24:55,120 --> 00:25:02,670 Light relief enough. And so I really feel fortunate that actually this is traditionally problematic. 241 00:25:02,670 --> 00:25:12,180 Complexity of tone might service rather well because we surely will want both and in different doses at different times. 242 00:25:12,180 --> 00:25:25,950 That will be really fascinating because I suppose ACT has often been a problem in the theatre because it has seemed so long and so inconsequential 243 00:25:25,950 --> 00:25:34,080 it and introduces a whole lot of new characters that put a late point in the play that actually none of them turn out to be important. 244 00:25:34,080 --> 00:25:35,250 And that sort of. 245 00:25:35,250 --> 00:25:43,630 It seemed very, very awkward and very difficult for for four directors to kind of manage and for audiences to follow the tonal changes. 246 00:25:43,630 --> 00:25:48,900 And it's a great thought that we might be exactly what we're ready for. Well, it's funny you say that. 247 00:25:48,900 --> 00:25:55,770 I've got this obsession with not sort of refusing to think that there's a character that isn't important, although, of course, I'm somewhat. 248 00:25:55,770 --> 00:26:00,450 You mean. So I've been really interested in what's going on. 249 00:26:00,450 --> 00:26:06,570 And I made one choice. I made a couple of choices about gender, as you might expect. 250 00:26:06,570 --> 00:26:15,210 So Autolycus is played by women and also perhaps more critically, for what we're talking about, the shepherd. 251 00:26:15,210 --> 00:26:23,310 So. It's a mother, not a father, and it's a mother, therefore, that finds the baby in the wake of the birth. 252 00:26:23,310 --> 00:26:28,440 As we were talking about and it's a mother who has it. 253 00:26:28,440 --> 00:26:33,990 It feels very betrayed by her daughter momentarily anyway, 254 00:26:33,990 --> 00:26:41,730 and has to then find a new footing in Sicilia in terms of discovering the truth about her adopted. 255 00:26:41,730 --> 00:26:47,940 So that's shifted something for us, because actually that feels like a really significant triangle now. 256 00:26:47,940 --> 00:26:52,200 I wish it were different. And we always sort out and I think it's there already. 257 00:26:52,200 --> 00:26:55,580 But it does it does shine a different light on it, 258 00:26:55,580 --> 00:27:02,430 thinking that actually having a loving mother and therefore navigating team of that beats rather than to fathers. 259 00:27:02,430 --> 00:27:08,820 Mm hmm. And I think the young shepherd really matters to me. 260 00:27:08,820 --> 00:27:13,080 Got this wonderful actor playing the young Schepper called William Grant. 261 00:27:13,080 --> 00:27:17,830 And well is his death and is performing in British sign language. 262 00:27:17,830 --> 00:27:22,270 And so he and I have done quite a lot work thinking about how to translate the language. 263 00:27:22,270 --> 00:27:27,510 He's done all the hard work, but it's been very rewarding work. 264 00:27:27,510 --> 00:27:40,050 From my point of view, because it's illuminated how that character arrives with a kind of straight forward attitude to life, death and love. 265 00:27:40,050 --> 00:27:47,850 And so actually, you get this dose of sanity. If you think of the play as the sort of kind of madness. 266 00:27:47,850 --> 00:27:53,420 I mean, he's not alone. But he's got the clearest, most open sense of what's right, what's wrong. 267 00:27:53,420 --> 00:28:01,020 And people die. And that's horrifying and should give us pause and we should mourn them and we should work properly and then we should move on. 268 00:28:01,020 --> 00:28:08,120 So there's this, I suppose I think the Bohemia offers this sense of what community should really be like. 269 00:28:08,120 --> 00:28:16,440 And that, I do think is going to speak to us, given what we've all been through and what we are lacking and may be lacking for quite a long time. 270 00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:17,280 I think you're absolutely right. 271 00:28:17,280 --> 00:28:25,370 I think it's so striking that the beginning of the of lockdown, all the stuff was, you know, King Lear and the plague and a precisely that. 272 00:28:25,370 --> 00:28:31,710 What will you say that somehow bleak tragedy is the way to, too? 273 00:28:31,710 --> 00:28:40,260 Is there any way to respond to this, that this this kind of situation and I don't think that is going to be that isn't going to be the case. 274 00:28:40,260 --> 00:28:44,550 But this is a really well-placed, interestingly place play, which will look different. 275 00:28:44,550 --> 00:28:51,890 I mean, that's one of Shakespeare's extraordinary properties, isn't it, that kind of ability to. 276 00:28:51,890 --> 00:28:56,510 So kind of already be there when you're when you find yourself in a different place. 277 00:28:56,510 --> 00:29:00,770 You go back to Shakespeare and Shakespeare is kind of there. Some have been there already. 278 00:29:00,770 --> 00:29:05,000 It's weird. Yeah, I'm not. I wanted to ask you about that because I. 279 00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:12,740 I have found your book so helpful in in being able to think about. 280 00:29:12,740 --> 00:29:20,170 How to how to make room for ourselves without taking the play a part reducing play. 281 00:29:20,170 --> 00:29:27,300 Now, I've admired lots of great Shakespeare productions which have reduced the play and have made a great evening in the theatre, 282 00:29:27,300 --> 00:29:31,840 but I'm not interested in doing that. I'm really excited by the whole thing. I'm editing it. 283 00:29:31,840 --> 00:29:39,180 But my question is, in these weeks, has it seem to you that there are new. 284 00:29:39,180 --> 00:29:45,150 Even new gaps or new or new things to fill the gaps in Shakespeare that you hadn't seen before. 285 00:29:45,150 --> 00:29:51,120 I think deaf. I think absolutely. Definitely. I think I mean, it's been really interesting to see. 286 00:29:51,120 --> 00:29:56,520 For one thing, it's been very interesting to see the turn turned to Shakespeare. 287 00:29:56,520 --> 00:30:00,960 That has been. It's also surprising and kind of wonderful. 288 00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:09,540 I mean, I think Patrick Stewart's sonnet reading, which has been a real kind of viral hit, as it were. 289 00:30:09,540 --> 00:30:16,360 It is. I mean, it's been an extraordinary moment is extraordinary to have, for example, poetry on the Today, a poem on the Today programme. 290 00:30:16,360 --> 00:30:23,340 You know, you think how. How serious have is this situation when we you know, it's poetry we have to turn to? 291 00:30:23,340 --> 00:30:31,800 So I think I think there's been in a way that perhaps what literary criticism has been embarrassed by, 292 00:30:31,800 --> 00:30:40,140 which is the idea that I don't know, the literary text might be conciliatory, might be helpful. 293 00:30:40,140 --> 00:30:47,780 Might might be. It's sort of ethically regenerative in some way. 294 00:30:47,780 --> 00:30:52,310 We've been a little bit cynical about that and a little bit snide about that, and it's very, 295 00:30:52,310 --> 00:30:58,130 very interesting to see it come back and to see when people are looking at a sort of stripped 296 00:30:58,130 --> 00:31:04,160 down life or a stripped down world or a sort of stripped down sense of what they do every day. 297 00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:13,850 Funnily enough, the sense that art is as a kind of spiritual kind of sustenance or a kind of intellectuals of creative sustenance. 298 00:31:13,850 --> 00:31:21,950 That's that's come back. And it's it's it's very interesting to see Shakespeare in, you know, in that insular pole position in that. 299 00:31:21,950 --> 00:31:28,100 I mean, I went back to the the work that I don't talk about my book at all because I 300 00:31:28,100 --> 00:31:34,650 always feel I actually feel I do get the poems as much as as as the as the plays. 301 00:31:34,650 --> 00:31:39,680 I don't find the poems as as spacious as I find the plays. 302 00:31:39,680 --> 00:31:44,390 And that's partly because of that mauls of moral objects sort of focus is partly because the sonnets, 303 00:31:44,390 --> 00:31:48,590 which are so technically beautiful, I find them very cold myself. 304 00:31:48,590 --> 00:31:52,910 And they don't really they don't work for me, which probably I'll probably be sacked. 305 00:31:52,910 --> 00:31:57,470 Now, having said that, but I went back to the innocent aloneness, 306 00:31:57,470 --> 00:32:03,110 which is a poem we do know Shakespeare wrote during plague times and where what 307 00:32:03,110 --> 00:32:07,310 seems is really interesting thing about the comparison with with Winter's Tale, 308 00:32:07,310 --> 00:32:12,350 I think because I think what Venus, Venus and Adonis is about, 309 00:32:12,350 --> 00:32:18,560 the goddess Venus is in love with Adonis who prefers to go hunting and doesn't doesn't want anything to do with her. 310 00:32:18,560 --> 00:32:26,330 So it's about this unrequited desire. And she feels to me like, you know, in the plague situation, 311 00:32:26,330 --> 00:32:33,440 she is on the side of comedy and saying, come on with you know, with is human can is connexion. 312 00:32:33,440 --> 00:32:38,270 It's it's it's community. It's being together. It's creativity. That's what going to fight this. 313 00:32:38,270 --> 00:32:41,750 And he is a tragic character and saying, you know, keep away from me. 314 00:32:41,750 --> 00:32:47,440 I'm I'm on my own. You know, I'm in my own world of important masculinity. 315 00:32:47,440 --> 00:32:51,110 I think it is gendered. 316 00:32:51,110 --> 00:32:57,800 And I suddenly thought, yeah, well, you know, she she goes off as a great line at the end that she she goes off to a mill herself. 317 00:32:57,800 --> 00:33:02,930 She goes off to quarantine, really to self isolation. But I'm reading it now, I think. 318 00:33:02,930 --> 00:33:07,640 Yeah, well, she'll be back. Venus will be back in the day. Dennis made the wrong call. 319 00:33:07,640 --> 00:33:15,800 I think so. So it's been great to go for me to go back to things that I hadn't found a way that they would speak to me, 320 00:33:15,800 --> 00:33:17,520 which is what we've always done with Shakespeare, isn't it? 321 00:33:17,520 --> 00:33:24,680 I mean, really famously those things like, you know, Toilsome Tresidder and nobody ever knew what to do with it until the Vietnam War. 322 00:33:24,680 --> 00:33:30,320 And suddenly it seemed like the most appropriate play of all measure for measure or something, 323 00:33:30,320 --> 00:33:35,480 which we've had a great review of in this old me to era. 324 00:33:35,480 --> 00:33:39,880 So it's you know, it's great to see that. 325 00:33:39,880 --> 00:33:42,660 Yeah, that's interesting. That's brilliant. But it isn't. 326 00:33:42,660 --> 00:33:49,070 And if I really agree and it makes me think something about the beginning of The Winter's Tale with which I'm obsessed. 327 00:33:49,070 --> 00:33:58,870 Forgive me. But actually, some of the some of the things we had been talking about around the early 50s and kind of post fascist world, 328 00:33:58,870 --> 00:34:03,700 I think I had a lens on that, which was about. 329 00:34:03,700 --> 00:34:11,350 Putting it putting war and fascism behind us, which feels like it's something that would have resonated with Shakespeare, 330 00:34:11,350 --> 00:34:17,120 putting turmoil in that sense and tyranny, he might put it behind him. 331 00:34:17,120 --> 00:34:22,720 Moving on, trying to move on, allowances can't move on. And I think. 332 00:34:22,720 --> 00:34:29,030 Joe, Alafair, you give me say this, but I think I wasn't very sympathetic to not being able to move on. 333 00:34:29,030 --> 00:34:32,020 I think there's a part of me stuck in this situation goes, oh, 334 00:34:32,020 --> 00:34:42,730 I can see just the immediate frustrations of not being able to communicate how you feel about it or know yet how you feel about it. 335 00:34:42,730 --> 00:34:49,550 I can see more vividly how you could get yourself into this as a crystalline state of after major. 336 00:34:49,550 --> 00:34:56,030 Global turmoil. Where you want to go back? Yes, I feel really strongly. 337 00:34:56,030 --> 00:35:01,140 It goes back to your question about does the place just you we need to go backwards or forwards. 338 00:35:01,140 --> 00:35:11,780 I know it's right that we need to go forward. And I've always been a kind of an optimist, but I feel that tug than there will be. 339 00:35:11,780 --> 00:35:21,270 There's another layer of grief required of you if you are going to put behind you who you were before the event was out of your control. 340 00:35:21,270 --> 00:35:28,440 That's so interesting, isn't it? Whether. Yeah. Whether grief is some some grief is for the past and some grief is for the future, isn't it? 341 00:35:28,440 --> 00:35:32,850 And I think a lot of us are in that position now in different ways. 342 00:35:32,850 --> 00:35:43,400 We are group grieving for the future that somehow seems very uncertain or isn't isn't unfolding, isn't unfolding as well as we thought. 343 00:35:43,400 --> 00:35:47,360 And yeah, it is great to have Shakespeare there. 344 00:35:47,360 --> 00:35:55,320 So I taught Shakespeare there with us. Shall we see what, um, what the wider community wants to contribute to the discussion? 345 00:35:55,320 --> 00:36:03,190 Let's see. Let's see. Was it. Can you come back in and help us with any of the questions? 346 00:36:03,190 --> 00:36:08,880 I can indeed. Thank you both. This is really interesting, the last. 347 00:36:08,880 --> 00:36:13,120 15 minutes questions have been flooding through and actually in some kind of uncanny way, 348 00:36:13,120 --> 00:36:20,170 you've been answering some of them already around questions like, well, what is plague writing? 349 00:36:20,170 --> 00:36:30,670 What is it? What aspects either of this particular play or Shakespeare's writing more broadly come out of his own experience of the plague, 350 00:36:30,670 --> 00:36:37,990 of being in isolation, of being in lockdown in various different ways or else the whole question. 351 00:36:37,990 --> 00:36:44,260 I mean, the very it seems to me there's a rich theme run through the discussion and through the questions, actually, about. 352 00:36:44,260 --> 00:36:49,450 OK. Did we learn in terms of the past? Are we learning stuff for the future here? 353 00:36:49,450 --> 00:36:58,870 And maybe one particular question that we can start with is, Erica, 354 00:36:58,870 --> 00:37:08,500 you talked about a moment at which when the characters leave you to explain who is, as you said it, desiccated. 355 00:37:08,500 --> 00:37:16,660 He hasn't designed anything for a while. He doesn't really know how to feel anymore, doesn't know how to connect with other people anymore. 356 00:37:16,660 --> 00:37:20,260 And that led them to your discussion between the two of you about, in a sense, 357 00:37:20,260 --> 00:37:25,450 how we might risk being in that space through this long lockdown period. 358 00:37:25,450 --> 00:37:29,290 We might unlearn various ways of connecting with others. 359 00:37:29,290 --> 00:37:38,760 And I don't. I wondered if either of you had anything to say about that, because that that that kind of question has come up a number of times. 360 00:37:38,760 --> 00:37:45,500 Yes, really. It's a really tough one, it's a brilliant question. And in a way, that's all we're talking about in the face at the moment. 361 00:37:45,500 --> 00:37:54,760 But. What is what is the sort of essence of that discussion is will is theatre when you can't have a big congregation? 362 00:37:54,760 --> 00:37:58,930 And of course, it's story, but it is more than that. 363 00:37:58,930 --> 00:38:06,640 There are so many forms of receiving story. And I, I none of us have simple solutions yet to how we might have socially distanced theatre. 364 00:38:06,640 --> 00:38:13,120 But I think the feel of a collective need to share experiences. 365 00:38:13,120 --> 00:38:16,660 I mean, it still feels like terrible cliches, but it's never felt so true. 366 00:38:16,660 --> 00:38:25,690 Vivid actually, to be in some sense sharing space, even if that is digitally in our emotional reaction and relationship. 367 00:38:25,690 --> 00:38:34,150 Feels like it's got to. We've got to fight for that. If we enter a period in our lives where that connexion is much, much reduced from what? 368 00:38:34,150 --> 00:38:43,220 From what we've known. Yeah. Also, as I was saying before, that sends I think the place suggests that. 369 00:38:43,220 --> 00:38:50,780 You do have to look beyond what you've known to some new pleasures, new joys. 370 00:38:50,780 --> 00:38:55,490 It's interesting you say pleasure because one person asks, there's all this stuff online. 371 00:38:55,490 --> 00:39:01,700 Now, that's not much an explosion of Shakespeare online. How do we negotiate between, on the one hand, 372 00:39:01,700 --> 00:39:07,730 the full time job of keeping up with all these productions and then sort of step back, take pleasure in it? 373 00:39:07,730 --> 00:39:12,020 I mean, Emma, you're right about taking pleasure in reading Shakespeare as well. 374 00:39:12,020 --> 00:39:17,480 I wondered if if the sort of a sense if there isn't too much on the line and that actually 375 00:39:17,480 --> 00:39:24,120 this is a chance to read stuff to and to rediscover a kind of Shakespeare who is read. 376 00:39:24,120 --> 00:39:34,250 Yeah. I mean, I feel contradictorily about this is completely wonderful that there are these productions made available ones that I for me, 377 00:39:34,250 --> 00:39:39,800 ones that I've seen before, ones that I would never have seen, on the other hand. 378 00:39:39,800 --> 00:39:44,000 I am spending a lot of my working life online. 379 00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:50,450 The idea that at the end of that working day, I would sit down and online, I would watch, you know, three and a half. 380 00:39:50,450 --> 00:40:00,020 Quite challenging hours of of Shakespearean theatre. Even to me that that feels as sort of a particular kind of kind of pleasure. 381 00:40:00,020 --> 00:40:06,650 And I think there is something to be said for a kind of analogue Shakespeare in these times, 382 00:40:06,650 --> 00:40:15,480 which is to get away from let's get away from the screen and to look to just have the different kind of physical engagement with that. 383 00:40:15,480 --> 00:40:20,300 That's about prints on it on a page. I mean, Shakespeare's readers didn't. 384 00:40:20,300 --> 00:40:26,270 I mean, they didn't read, I didn't think for the plot. They didn't read from start to finish, which we shouldn't feel that we have to do that either. 385 00:40:26,270 --> 00:40:34,010 They can zone in on you know, you could have a look at the the bear or at, you know, the very final scene of A Winter's Tale. 386 00:40:34,010 --> 00:40:40,010 That'll be a lovely thing just to read on the page. It doesn't need to be partners of everything else. 387 00:40:40,010 --> 00:40:44,140 I mean, I, I think there are wonderful kinds of opportunities of lockdown. 388 00:40:44,140 --> 00:40:51,260 But we are often creatures who, you know, make lists and kind of obligations for ourselves, don't we? 389 00:40:51,260 --> 00:40:56,530 And, you know, if it becomes a chore. 390 00:40:56,530 --> 00:41:03,320 You know, it's it that's not really that's not really working. But on the other hand, it's a wonderful yes, it's a wonderful opportunity. 391 00:41:03,320 --> 00:41:09,860 One of the other things that's resonated with a number of people that you mentioned was the Erica right at the beginning. 392 00:41:09,860 --> 00:41:15,100 You talked about the sort of. The increasing absence of truth at the beginning of the play. 393 00:41:15,100 --> 00:41:24,280 Now, you didn't say fake news and maybe you don't want to draw too immediate a parallel precisely because you haven't read the play kind of now. 394 00:41:24,280 --> 00:41:35,230 But a bigger question there might be whether this sort of dissembling of truth amounts to a critique of religion, of power, of tyranny, of gender. 395 00:41:35,230 --> 00:41:39,730 I mean, how do you polls that? I think it does all those things. 396 00:41:39,730 --> 00:41:46,670 And actually, the reason I set it in the 50s was because I think that might reveal those things more vividly. 397 00:41:46,670 --> 00:41:47,990 That's what I meant by reducing it. 398 00:41:47,990 --> 00:41:54,170 You know, it isn't it isn't about one of them and it isn't about one politician in our lives, which can be the inference. 399 00:41:54,170 --> 00:42:05,010 It's it's rather, I think, about assumptions about the things you've listed, in particular what masculine power looks like when it's invested in you. 400 00:42:05,010 --> 00:42:14,950 And when it's invested in you by God or the gods. And we were influenced or I was influenced by a book I really admire by Cape Man called Down Girl, 401 00:42:14,950 --> 00:42:25,180 which attempts a new formulation of misogyny that although it's a quite sort of excoriating account of misogynistic behaviour, 402 00:42:25,180 --> 00:42:32,260 actually, I find it strangely compassionate book because it it tries to guess out what it is to think you're 403 00:42:32,260 --> 00:42:38,710 entitled to a certain status in life and what goes wrong when that status is not fulfilled. 404 00:42:38,710 --> 00:42:44,800 And that is, I think, what happened sort of inside Lyons's to some degree is invested with this power. 405 00:42:44,800 --> 00:42:49,420 And yet somehow there are still these competing forces. 406 00:42:49,420 --> 00:43:00,760 And I I think that the way he abuses his power is to get back to a sort of primal sense that surely he doesn't need to consult in that way. 407 00:43:00,760 --> 00:43:06,030 That really made us laugh. And Rasselas, but also really fruitful as an idea that you've got. 408 00:43:06,030 --> 00:43:09,290 He's actually very brilliant man around him. So. 409 00:43:09,290 --> 00:43:14,800 So Shakespeare also doesn't present, you know, completely complicit man. 410 00:43:14,800 --> 00:43:23,080 He presents a real range of voices trying to get him to listen and remarking in deeds that that truth has collapsed. 411 00:43:23,080 --> 00:43:29,220 And he will he will be laughed at for that. And yet they can't stop him. 412 00:43:29,220 --> 00:43:35,230 And I think there is something I mean, you know, much remarked upon that the person who gets closest is Paul Minor. 413 00:43:35,230 --> 00:43:40,030 So in a way, she's onto the gendered nature of knots of that insecurity. 414 00:43:40,030 --> 00:43:44,630 And I think when she accuses him of tyranny. She's going to his heart. 415 00:43:44,630 --> 00:43:51,270 He's saying, I know you. I know this isn't who you are. But you are capable of being collegiate and consultative. 416 00:43:51,270 --> 00:43:58,870 Indeed, maybe democratic and having a notion of objectivity. But you're insisting on ignoring all of that by yourself in your court. 417 00:43:58,870 --> 00:44:02,340 So I could. God, I absolutely do. That's what I said. 418 00:44:02,340 --> 00:44:09,810 Does it dismantles all of that. And then on top of that dismantles the notion that religion will protect you. 419 00:44:09,810 --> 00:44:15,600 Religion will offer you a moral compass, but it won't protect you from yourself. 420 00:44:15,600 --> 00:44:22,810 Which seat seems to be radical both then and now? And would you want to add to that? 421 00:44:22,810 --> 00:44:31,980 I'm just I'm just processing what what what I said. I mean, that's a fabulously expansive view of the plays. 422 00:44:31,980 --> 00:44:42,450 And I mean, it takes the play out of the kind of familial context. And I think I think that is a very contemporary way of hearing the word tyranny 423 00:44:42,450 --> 00:44:51,120 that's that's attached to the parties and hearing the kind of politics, the real political force behind that. 424 00:44:51,120 --> 00:44:55,780 And, you know, I'm reminding them that these are kings in another context. 425 00:44:55,780 --> 00:45:02,820 I mean, you yourself have talked about the privatisation. In other words, what looks like a kind of family story. 426 00:45:02,820 --> 00:45:08,520 Yeah, it's actually also very much a national bigger politics. 427 00:45:08,520 --> 00:45:15,720 I think we've gone through a period of of of maybe domesticating Shakespeare's plays and saying this is a family. 428 00:45:15,720 --> 00:45:17,790 You know, King Lear is a dad. 429 00:45:17,790 --> 00:45:24,480 And, you know, this is what's sort of important about about these relationships, because we think that's a way we can we can relate to it. 430 00:45:24,480 --> 00:45:32,840 You know, Hamlet student and all of those things. I mean, you know, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, you know, the play is called King Lear, not Lear. 431 00:45:32,840 --> 00:45:38,980 Lay on aunties and public scenes are kings. You know, these are these are political figures whose. 432 00:45:38,980 --> 00:45:48,730 In some ways, his political views as sort of emotional relationships or family relationships may be metaphors for that for the government, 433 00:45:48,730 --> 00:45:55,380 rather than psychically compelling portraits of a family like, you know, like someone else's family. 434 00:45:55,380 --> 00:46:05,470 That seems a really important thing to think about. About Winter's Tale, which I feel has some very, very important kind of ethical component. 435 00:46:05,470 --> 00:46:16,560 But I think sometimes it's sentimentalised and made into a kind of fantasy or kind of rose tinted sort of play, particularly in conclusion. 436 00:46:16,560 --> 00:46:21,280 That's been revelator to me, too, to just hear what what what I am saying. 437 00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:27,610 Another thing that comes up in relation to the whole truth question is another strand that ran through your discussion, 438 00:46:27,610 --> 00:46:32,680 which was madness, both madness within the specific play. 439 00:46:32,680 --> 00:46:39,100 But also one person very straightforwardly asks, why is madness such a recurring theme across Shakespeare's work? 440 00:46:39,100 --> 00:46:44,850 I don't know which one of you wants to address. I have finished. Good question. 441 00:46:44,850 --> 00:46:51,900 I mean, that's a great question, isn't it? And I was thinking as you were talking, Erica, you said you glossed Magnus's mental illness. 442 00:46:51,900 --> 00:46:59,990 And sometimes I think Shakespeares madness. What we call madness in Shakespeare is susceptible to a different kind of vocabulary 443 00:46:59,990 --> 00:47:06,080 which will now use about mental distress or mental disease in some way at other times, 444 00:47:06,080 --> 00:47:10,580 I think it's just not susceptible to that. And I think madness is a much more theatrical device. 445 00:47:10,580 --> 00:47:15,600 It's one of the ways I feel as if Shakespeare has different. 446 00:47:15,600 --> 00:47:20,400 I actually think through through Shakespeare has different ways of showing what's going on inside. 447 00:47:20,400 --> 00:47:30,880 And we have tended to prioritise soliloquy, the kind of speech, big speech on your own as the main vehicle for exploring the interior. 448 00:47:30,880 --> 00:47:34,160 But I think that's only one of a number of kind of attempts Shakespeare make. 449 00:47:34,160 --> 00:47:38,770 Sometimes there's a kind of dialogue or a split personality almost between two characters. 450 00:47:38,770 --> 00:47:45,570 I think he does that bit with Othello and Jago. In some ways that feels sometimes more like an interior dialogue. 451 00:47:45,570 --> 00:47:51,350 And I think I think madness, the depiction of madness is another way of saying here's what's beneath the surface, 452 00:47:51,350 --> 00:47:55,850 or here's what this person can't articulate themselves. And they are. 453 00:47:55,850 --> 00:47:59,480 That's an understanding, which is partly about a human or psychic. 454 00:47:59,480 --> 00:48:04,520 But it's it seems deeply theatrical to me because it's about how you show something, 455 00:48:04,520 --> 00:48:09,920 which is the thing that, you know, theatre people now and then are really looking for. 456 00:48:09,920 --> 00:48:19,270 How do you demonstrate this rather than just describe it? I'd only add to that I think one of the filch currencies is multiplicity. 457 00:48:19,270 --> 00:48:24,750 So I think in the later plays and not just Winter's Tale, 458 00:48:24,750 --> 00:48:29,400 she gets really interested in the idea that a certain kind of sadness or a certain 459 00:48:29,400 --> 00:48:35,000 kind of aloneness is about not being able to embrace all the parts of yourself. 460 00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:43,800 And for me and in The Winter's Tale, Autolycus bursting on the sort of bonkers, almost just implausible way. 461 00:48:43,800 --> 00:48:53,670 What I love about it is that she he is is really comfortable, uncomfortable in front of an audience. 462 00:48:53,670 --> 00:49:03,600 Being 16 people at once, that's all fine and moving in a line line to line between different tones and different personalities. 463 00:49:03,600 --> 00:49:06,320 And I suppose I think there's an. 464 00:49:06,320 --> 00:49:14,630 Well, I absolutely agree that sometimes he uses it as a means of communication, almost a way, a way of saying what you need to say. 465 00:49:14,630 --> 00:49:20,810 And sometimes it's nearer to the unease or disease or pain that what's in common 466 00:49:20,810 --> 00:49:26,540 across those two ideas is that we are many things in many in every in every moment. 467 00:49:26,540 --> 00:49:31,160 And that Sanyasi, in a way, is is knowing and living that. 468 00:49:31,160 --> 00:49:37,320 And he sees, I think, a sanyasi in the actor. That often, I think, in your country, culture gets lost. 469 00:49:37,320 --> 00:49:39,390 It's not pretending to be somebody else. 470 00:49:39,390 --> 00:49:47,940 It's being in touch with a multiplicity of characters and character traits that live in some sense in yourself. 471 00:49:47,940 --> 00:49:53,450 Otherwise, you're not leading. We're moving now on to questions performance. 472 00:49:53,450 --> 00:49:56,370 We'll come back to domestic and political questions a minute. 473 00:49:56,370 --> 00:50:02,790 But to two people in particular have a sort of performance related questions that connected to what we talked about already. 474 00:50:02,790 --> 00:50:08,820 I think one is talking about implausible and madness and outlandish things. 475 00:50:08,820 --> 00:50:14,160 It's a question for Erica, really. What is the most outlandish setting you've considered staging one of Shakespeare's plays? 476 00:50:14,160 --> 00:50:19,010 In a way, you sort of set yourself a mad world. 477 00:50:19,010 --> 00:50:23,520 To put things in order. No, no, I haven't. 478 00:50:23,520 --> 00:50:28,140 And it's really it's interesting that question, because I'm I've quite enjoyed some outlandish settings in my time, 479 00:50:28,140 --> 00:50:37,290 but never really drawn to them, I think, because I'm really interested in the kind of rooted. 480 00:50:37,290 --> 00:50:46,550 A psychological, truthful or something that's going on in these deeply implausible, often implausible plots. 481 00:50:46,550 --> 00:50:51,380 That's something we recognise. So recognition is really driven me. 482 00:50:51,380 --> 00:50:54,630 I mean, I like the Romeo and Juliet. I did two years ago. 483 00:50:54,630 --> 00:51:07,120 I was very, very ordinary sassing, which was right now, but felt really felt really daring somehow, even though it's been done before. 484 00:51:07,120 --> 00:51:16,010 Because of the expectation of romance. So to set it up in a in a in a cityscape, that's got the kind of brutality. 485 00:51:16,010 --> 00:51:22,390 And it's, you know, it's a rude space in a way, a space in place of vulgarity and of honesty and violence. 486 00:51:22,390 --> 00:51:26,760 Weirdly, still did feel quite shocking to some. 487 00:51:26,760 --> 00:51:33,430 And who outlandish to me sometimes don't do properly outlandish should I should experiment. 488 00:51:33,430 --> 00:51:42,730 There's a wonderful cartoon that question and I enjoyed by Tom Gold, who giu oldy, who does cartoons for The Guardian Review and The New Scientist. 489 00:51:42,730 --> 00:51:47,170 And he's got a cartoon which is called The Knight Shakespeare Production Generator. 490 00:51:47,170 --> 00:51:50,950 And down one side, down one column that is kind of mad settings and members. 491 00:51:50,950 --> 00:51:59,830 The next column is a mad costuming and then a mad sauce, you know, in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein or something. 492 00:51:59,830 --> 00:52:04,750 At the end is a great it's a really great cartoon that, again, you're answering people's questions. 493 00:52:04,750 --> 00:52:08,320 Even before I asked them. One person asked about the relationship between, let's say, 494 00:52:08,320 --> 00:52:14,570 ballet productions or musical productions or film productions of Shakespeare and stage productions and the degree to which, 495 00:52:14,570 --> 00:52:22,880 you know, you have them in mind as a producer or indeed as a scholar, as part of your your kind of work on what Shakespeare's about. 496 00:52:22,880 --> 00:52:30,700 We'd like to do that. We've only got about eight minutes left. So unless you want to particularly address the other general question, 497 00:52:30,700 --> 00:52:37,510 I like to return to the question of of silence because a quite a few questions about violence. 498 00:52:37,510 --> 00:52:44,820 Erica, you mentioned the fact that at the end of the play. They do not speak to each other or if they're not given. 499 00:52:44,820 --> 00:52:50,160 Now, again, you can sort of polls that in two different ways. And actually two different questions have done that. 500 00:52:50,160 --> 00:52:57,580 One has said, what do you make of the fact that she never she barely speaks in the final scene and says nothing to her brutal husband, 501 00:52:57,580 --> 00:53:04,390 in a sense, doesn't call him out. And the other one says her silence over spoken so loudly. 502 00:53:04,390 --> 00:53:12,490 I wonder where either of you think silence leaves us at the end of this play? 503 00:53:12,490 --> 00:53:17,500 I think there's hope. I mean, I don't think there's ease. 504 00:53:17,500 --> 00:53:24,340 I don't think there's any going back. As I said, I think there's hope in that silence because he's silent, too. 505 00:53:24,340 --> 00:53:31,330 I think that's really powerful for me. I think he, in some sense, is not her brutal husband anymore. 506 00:53:31,330 --> 00:53:37,270 I don't think that means he's guilt free or or or without trauma. 507 00:53:37,270 --> 00:53:50,410 And I have no idea whether she can love him. But Shakespeare suggests that he is sufficiently changed to to experience her again. 508 00:53:50,410 --> 00:53:56,060 And that's that's the opens. It opens the door. And she she's very clear. 509 00:53:56,060 --> 00:54:01,180 I mean, she doesn't say very much due to the obvious. 510 00:54:01,180 --> 00:54:08,320 But once see, once she can speak, she's very clear that she has preserved herself for her daughter. 511 00:54:08,320 --> 00:54:14,760 She remains the mother of his child. And actually, I find that also rather contemporary reading, if you like. 512 00:54:14,760 --> 00:54:18,310 You know, we can we know this now. You can't have a child of someone. 513 00:54:18,310 --> 00:54:21,910 And then in some sense fundamentally split up from them. 514 00:54:21,910 --> 00:54:28,120 You can divorce them and not live with them. But you are in a family forever. 515 00:54:28,120 --> 00:54:35,360 And I that's how I read the ending. Am I supposed to read the silence? 516 00:54:35,360 --> 00:54:42,740 Was this could this particular silence stay liberalise or they exemplify a kind of 517 00:54:42,740 --> 00:54:50,230 a sort of intrinsic openness that the plays I think have at all kinds of moments. 518 00:54:50,230 --> 00:55:02,460 And so I suppose one of the differences about reading or kind of reading as opposed to performance is that. 519 00:55:02,460 --> 00:55:10,350 It might be easier not to not to fill the silence or not to us not to interpret it. 520 00:55:10,350 --> 00:55:18,550 It might be easier to leave it as as a kind of as an absence or as a or as a silence or a boulder as potential for lots of different kinds of endings. 521 00:55:18,550 --> 00:55:27,640 I mean, I do think that the reason one of the reasons Shakespeare's plays have been so perennial is because these hardwired 522 00:55:27,640 --> 00:55:39,050 ambiguities allow us to come back to them again and and see them do them differently or resolve them differently. 523 00:55:39,050 --> 00:55:42,170 It's interesting, though, that what you're talking again and again, 524 00:55:42,170 --> 00:55:48,770 it's another question that's come up, it's about sense, the difference between reading and watching. 525 00:55:48,770 --> 00:55:51,260 And we've we've addressed that before. 526 00:55:51,260 --> 00:55:59,210 But I suppose it's again, it's a question that somebody else about the rehearsal process when you're in rehearsal. 527 00:55:59,210 --> 00:56:04,400 Do you think of yourselves as sort of translating a reading experience into something else, 528 00:56:04,400 --> 00:56:09,200 or is it altogether different as a kind of physical process? 529 00:56:09,200 --> 00:56:11,240 What's the relationship between what one reads? 530 00:56:11,240 --> 00:56:20,000 And it's the page to stage question, but it's also kind of the intimacy of reading and the collective bodily experience of being in the show. 531 00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:23,990 Can Erika draw have anything to say about that? Yeah, it's a really great question. 532 00:56:23,990 --> 00:56:29,150 I mean, I think we often imagine in rehearsals that we're doing a kind of collective reading. 533 00:56:29,150 --> 00:56:33,250 We're reading to understand with one another with different different lenses. 534 00:56:33,250 --> 00:56:40,660 And when you were playing and we were playing in the room. But I'm that's very rewarding because there are so many clues, you know, 535 00:56:40,660 --> 00:56:46,850 you find stage directions where you didn't think they were there and you find clues in the in the in the iambic, 536 00:56:46,850 --> 00:56:53,020 even though you might not be being very obedient to it. Somehow there's a new meaning revealed by close reading. 537 00:56:53,020 --> 00:57:02,110 But at the same time, where what am I saying becomes very vivid is when you get stuck on actually in these rehearsals, I got stuck. 538 00:57:02,110 --> 00:57:08,950 More fundamentally than I had done for a few years. There was a there was a famous afternoon was meant to do about five scenes and I couldn't do it. 539 00:57:08,950 --> 00:57:12,520 I couldn't get out of four outfoxing three because, look, 540 00:57:12,520 --> 00:57:18,250 you've got lots of brilliant people in that scene saying very little and trying to understand it. 541 00:57:18,250 --> 00:57:22,570 One line they do say, and how it relates to everybody else. And we could we just couldn't do it. 542 00:57:22,570 --> 00:57:27,640 We had so many conflicting views of what it might mean and therefore how we should approach it. 543 00:57:27,640 --> 00:57:32,950 And we gave up I gave up in a social scene and tried to be really vulnerable and say, well, we just don't. 544 00:57:32,950 --> 00:57:40,990 Let's just decision. Next time we came back to that scene, we ran it together with, I think, the whole play. 545 00:57:40,990 --> 00:57:46,380 And it happened in a way that was very satisfying, probably never to be recreated again. 546 00:57:46,380 --> 00:57:55,870 But fingers crossed because we accepted that all questions are individual questions were questions without answers. 547 00:57:55,870 --> 00:58:02,500 And when it was only sort of when those questions were the streams crossed, the magic occurred. 548 00:58:02,500 --> 00:58:09,010 So we couldn't get our heads around Camilla. Camilla and Paulina. And when it happened, it was what all of us wanted to happen. 549 00:58:09,010 --> 00:58:12,400 We just wanted that to happen without text. 550 00:58:12,400 --> 00:58:22,480 So I'm I'm really fundamentally agreeing there is something that goes beyond reading and then comes back to the ambiguity and happiness of reading. 551 00:58:22,480 --> 00:58:29,470 If you trust in that act of reading together and don't try and resolve it, or we often say, you know, 552 00:58:29,470 --> 00:58:35,500 we mustn't inadvertently try and write an essay and explain the essay, that's for another space. 553 00:58:35,500 --> 00:58:43,030 This is about trusting that it doesn't entirely make sense and that you want to take us towards our conclusion. 554 00:58:43,030 --> 00:58:47,110 JEBB More thoughts on on what Erika just said. 555 00:58:47,110 --> 00:58:51,650 I was thinking about something that you said right at the beginning, I had lots of thoughts about that, but I just never used it. 556 00:58:51,650 --> 00:58:54,200 Lots of some news at the beginning about about plague, 557 00:58:54,200 --> 00:59:02,270 literature and literature of plague and thinking about something I read by the brilliant assessed Adam Gopnik. 558 00:59:02,270 --> 00:59:09,830 And he was talking about coming as the plague and saying, we've had decades of saying this is a book. 559 00:59:09,830 --> 00:59:15,110 This is this is a metaphor. Plague is a metaphor. And in reading this literature, metaphorically. 560 00:59:15,110 --> 00:59:19,500 And now, you know, we're coming back to me literally. And I suppose that doesn't mean that, you know, it's Shakespeare. 561 00:59:19,500 --> 00:59:23,180 It's in some ways they are, you know, a different way round. 562 00:59:23,180 --> 00:59:31,310 It's somehow, you know, the I don't know, the kind of the metaphors are actually about the plague or something. 563 00:59:31,310 --> 00:59:39,560 There's something slightly different about about what the relation between what's going on and what Shakespeare actually writes. 564 00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:45,230 So that's something that's been ticking over in my mind, as you've been asking. That's some of the some of the other questions. 565 00:59:45,230 --> 00:59:49,460 That's very interesting. But again, one questions just come in saying thanks for all that. 566 00:59:49,460 --> 00:59:53,120 Well, thanks for the great talk. They nearly all start with that. I'm very curious about the buyer. 567 00:59:53,120 --> 01:00:00,500 Should it retain its beastly material quality or should it be priced primarily transfigured as a metaphore into the passionate space of the play? 568 01:00:00,500 --> 01:00:04,790 It seems to me we've been talking about exactly that all the way through. Absolutely brilliant. 569 01:00:04,790 --> 01:00:11,240 One way or the other. Yes. And I think where we're officially at the end of our time, 570 01:00:11,240 --> 01:00:16,910 one other person has suggested that perhaps as a sign off, we can all do it as if pursued by a bear. 571 01:00:16,910 --> 01:00:22,610 I don't know if you you particularly want to do that, but I have been pursued by a WASP for quite a lot of the time. 572 01:00:22,610 --> 01:00:26,090 So I'm sorry if there's a lot of buzzing on my part of the. 573 01:00:26,090 --> 01:00:33,740 We haven't noticed at all. I think I I've got a few more ways to say in a second, but I'm very, very. 574 01:00:33,740 --> 01:00:37,190 I think some of the discussion about Venus and Adonis was also really great. 575 01:00:37,190 --> 01:00:44,870 And I love the idea, Emma, that you've offered us that Venus will be back at some stage in all of this. 576 01:00:44,870 --> 01:00:47,780 So I'm afraid I need to bring things to a close now, 577 01:00:47,780 --> 01:00:53,510 but I can't do so without giving enormous thanks to our two brilliant speakers for giving us a wonderful, 578 01:00:53,510 --> 01:00:57,080 generous and thought provoking session this evening. 579 01:00:57,080 --> 01:01:02,690 It's clear it's been clear from the question, the online discussion and actually the interaction that you haven't seen. 580 01:01:02,690 --> 01:01:06,080 But I can see from the nuts and bolts back backstage, as it were, 581 01:01:06,080 --> 01:01:14,090 the interaction between the online discussion on the questions as it emerged that Erica and Emma have exemplified how research and practise can cross, 582 01:01:14,090 --> 01:01:19,730 fertilise and compliment each other and all sorts of sometimes unexpected ways. 583 01:01:19,730 --> 01:01:26,570 So a big thank you to to our viewers at home for watching and for your comments and questions. 584 01:01:26,570 --> 01:01:31,190 But as I say, our primary thanks go to both you and Erica. 585 01:01:31,190 --> 01:01:35,080 Thank you for your time and for your generosity. 586 01:01:35,080 --> 01:01:41,440 Everyone else, and because you two are welcome to please join us for next week's Big Tent Big Ideas Live event on Thursday, 587 01:01:41,440 --> 01:01:48,700 30th of April at five p.m. with Professor Abby Williams, who will be part of our reading week theme. 588 01:01:48,700 --> 01:01:55,540 Abby will be discussing the social life of books, a history of reading together at home with readings and a workshop. 589 01:01:55,540 --> 01:01:59,790 We hope you'll be able to join us again. Them. 590 01:01:59,790 --> 01:02:10,260 Thank you once more to Emma and Erica, you've given your time, your thoughts, your questions and your engagement as we came together online. 591 01:02:10,260 --> 01:02:17,820 This series would not be possible without the support also from many other people, including the torch team and, of course, our audience. 592 01:02:17,820 --> 01:02:27,330 We seem to have taken Emma and Erica away, but I'm sure they would thank us for joining in here today. 593 01:02:27,330 --> 01:02:58,272 So thank you, everyone, and goodbye.