The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Sir Trevor Nunn

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Lawrence discusses Shakespeare, education and science with the Tony award-winning director and former head of the Royal Shakespeare company Sir Trevor Nunn. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

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Hello, and welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. I first encountered the remarkable Trevor Nunn at the New College of Humanities in London, where we were both visiting lecturers. Trevor attended my classes during which he asked the most incisive questions of everyone. Sir Trevor Nunn is one of the most accomplished theater directors alive.

Among his many positions, he served as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, and may be the first director since Shakespeare to direct all of Shakespeare's works. His unique insights into the man and his life made for a remarkable conversation. But Trevor's talents and interests go way beyond Shakespeare.

For instance, he brought the original Katz production Anne Le Miserables to Broadway, for which he won two of his four Tony Awards. Because of his broad, literary, and musical interests, our discussion at his home in London was equally broad. It ranged over a very personal discussion of how a single teacher can change a child's life to what excites him about literature and performance.

And finally, what insights theatre can provide for understanding our modern world. Overall, this was a fascinating conversation with a cultural icon who was intrigued by all aspects of the world, including science, exemplifying how science need not be a threat to the humanities, but rather could enhance our understanding and enjoyment of all these disciplines. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program

and all our programs immediately upon their release at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. Trevor, thanks for welcoming us here to your corridors here, and it's great to be here. But let me start with the question. I've never asked you. Why Shakespeare?

That's a very, very big question. And that involves a considerable part of my early life story. I had no knowledge of anything to do with William Shakespeare until I was 12 years old. And I went to see school production. of a play called A Midsummer Night's Dream. And so many of, we call them Sixth Formers, who I kind of was in a kind of idolatrous relationship

with these wonderful guys who played for the tennis team and the rugby team and all of that were now up there doing a play. And I was absolutely enraptured. And I began to imitate one of the performances. It was a guy who was playing the role of Bottom. And I thought those speeches were absolutely hilarious. And on various occasions,

my parents and my sister and I would go visit relatives. who lived on the other side of town for a kind of tea. And while I was there, I began my bottom impersonation. Great hilarity everywhere. And then my aunt said, hold on, hold on. I'm going to go try and find something. And she disappeared, and we thought nothing of it. and she was gone for, I guess, a half hour.

And she came back, and she was blowing the dust off a book. And it was the complete works of William Shakespeare that she'd been given as a school prize when she was 12 or 13 or 14 years old and had never opened it, never looked at it, and it was in an attic. and I was presented with the complete works of William Shakespeare. You see, we live in a random universe.

Yes, we do. And that little random moment completely changed my life. I mean, there various things that aided and abetted because I had a wonderful English teacher, by which I mean English literature teacher. And he was so... so brilliant at expounding Shakespeare but making it live.

That awful thing that I guess many students were so horrified by when the teacher says just let's go around the class and read the words and there you go that's that scene and that Shakespeare play and it's deadly

and dreadful and this teacher could bring it alive. He could make you understand how the language has so frequently not changed, and how those characters are entirely still recognizable. He was absolutely wonderful. And then, of course, it turned out that that teacher was the director of the school

play each year. So my idolatry then transferred to him. Oh, I was, okay, you're just spending so many questions in mine, but okay. And so through him and through then starting to see Shakespeare plays, I became absolutely passionate about the greatest of all dramatists. Well, I heard you had a teacher at an impact. I think for all of us, teachers have had an amazing impact. It's not only an underappreciated profession,

but I think that good teachers, I was going to ask about this. Good teachers, I think, as you say, did not, don't just tell you things. They help you discover things. And the way he brought Shakespeare to life for you helped you discover for yourself, right? He was a very, very remarkable man.

I discovered, as I got to know more about him, that he wrote poetry, that he had written a novel that he just about managed to get published, but I think it probably had a readership of ten. And he had lived through a very high-ferment political era before the war when he was a student. So he was extraordinarily knowledgeable and articulate about all of the things that are the background to our study. And as I got to know him better, I suppose I was privileged in the sense that he did slightly single me out as somebody to promote as a young actor at school and somebody to talk to about the business of directing plays and so on.

To the point where it transpired that he lived with his family in a windmill outside town. And each weekend I would... would bicycle out to his windmill, which was 12 miles outside of town. He would do extra sessions. Oh, wow. Then, in addition to that, absolutely extraordinary. I mean, there were several of us who did it, but extraordinarily, he would then take us to the village pub and we would sit and smoke.

I mean, he would be breaking all the rules with us. And then he began to call us by our first names rather than our surnames. And that was unheard of. Oh, really? It's unheard of. You should ever, ever use somebody's first name at school. Wow. So, yes, he was rebellious in every way and inspirational in every way.

Yeah, well, that's it. Now, when you were talking, I was going to ask you not just why Shakespeare, but in some sense, why directing at some point. But as you pointed out, he was, so was he sort of the role model for why you might want to become a director rather than an actor? That was one very, very potent ingredient. But in this random world, something else happened when I was 13. I read a paragraph on the front page of the local newspaper,

small industrial town, that said that the local professional theater was seeking a local boy to play a part in a rather famous American play called Life with Father. And that auditions. would take place and take it. And I cut out that little paragraph and I didn't tell my parents

and I went to the appointed place and I auditioned and there were huge number of kids there. And I was then asked to come back. I still didn't tell my parents. And so I went back a week later. A callback. A callback.

We now refer to it as. And I was then told we want you to play the part. So I then had to, A, tell my parents and B, negotiate with the school that I would need certain periods of time off lessons. And the headmaster was very unwilling, but eventually that wonderful English teacher persuaded and persuaded, and I was given permission. So I found myself in a rehearsal room with a group of, as it transpired, absolutely brilliant young professional actors. I mean, the youngish actor playing my dad was a man called Paul Eddington,

who about 15 years later became an absolute national treasure. I mean, he was on television three times a week in various series. And the girl playing the cousin who was visiting was an actress called Wendy Cray. and she had a giant TV success just a few years later. And very amusingly, the actor playing the vicar, the local minister, was an actor called Clive Revel. And Clive went to America, became the original Fagin in Oliver, in the American production, went over to Los Angeles,

had a film career and a TV. I mean, a staggering influence on a 13-year-old. So, of course, but at that point, only, only the theatre was the pathway for me. I assumed at that point that I wanted to grow up to be an actor. And of course, it's a terrible, terrible loss to the actor. in the end, I decided that shouldn't be the case. I mean, you know, we lost an Olivier there. But there you go.

But so was there a moment? Well, was it just, again, one of the random acts of the universe that led you to become a director? I know you got a scholarship to after Cambridge, right? Well, going to Cambridge once again was that English teacher who one day, said, I think you should go for an open scholarship. It was not the remotest possibility of my being able to do any such thing. I came from a little working class home. Actually, I wanted to ask about that. Let's step back before we get to that. You came from a work class home. You

had this teacher and you had this experience of being taken by paking to a play, which was profoundly important. But your family background wasn't in literature. Your father was a cabinet maker? Indeed, my dad worked at the bench. And when I was a kid in an absolutely enraptured way, I would go and watch him work at the bench because this little factory, factory is too larger word. It was a workshop, a workshop place. My dad and four or five other guys would make furniture. But my memory is of my dad with a plane at a bench and with a chisel. Wonderful.

Just all of these guys concentrating on absolutely precise fit of every bit of wood into every bit of wood. And my mom worked when she did work as seamstress. And so through my childhood, I was very used to the image of my mom making clothes for us. Because we had very, very little money. we had total happiness who needs money when you have an absolutely loving family

and we just my sister and I had the most wonderful childhood immediately post-war but they weren't and therefore there was no theater connection and no education

no real literature in the house my dad left school when he was 14. My mom left school when she was 15. And so they had no knowledge of the kinds of things that I was studying. They were at times slightly alarmed, slightly concerned, slightly worried that I was doing things like Latin and French. I was going to wonder, I was wondering if they wanted to be worried with Lille. literature acting as a potential profession about the likelihood of making a living, where did they want you to go into a more...

Completely, completely the opposite. You see that there is, of course, a tradition that middle class and upper and aristocratic parents will say to their children, how dare you think about going into the theatre, that awful, awful, dreadful. No, no, no, no. No, you mustn't do that. You must work in a bank. You must get a proper job. And so my parents were totally enthusiastic.

Oh, that's wonderful. And because there was just the possibility that if you did something like that, you could get out of the environment. The risk didn't enter their minds. Just the possibility that you could. the possibility that you could get up and out. And then I'd interrupt you, but that's sort of what happened, in a way, through at least this open scholarship.

So that's where you were when I interrupted you to ask about your parents. But your teacher had encouraged you. That teacher said, I think you should have a go. And I felt completely unequal to that task. So that's when a lot of these extra teaching sessions came in. And he would meet me early in the morning at 8.30 and do some stuff ahead of school and then through the lunch break while everybody else was at play. And then after school and then these weekend sessions. And so he became sort of fixated on.

I think this could happen. And then in order to take the Open scholarship examination, one has to go and stay for four, four and a half days in Cambridge. And that means a railfare and you have to pay for the right to stay overnight and so on. There was no possibility of my parents affording that. And so my teacher said, you have to go to the headmaster and apply for some money from the poor boy's fund. And I went to the headmaster and he looked at various reports of mine and then at me. And then he said, no, no, no. I think this is not a good idea.

I think you should concentrate on your normal exams, and I don't think we should be giving you this money. And I was very shattered, and I left the headmaster study. The next person to walk by was that English teacher. I don't think that was an accident. I think he was waiting. I think he came down the corridor, and he then said to me, okay, is everything fine?

And I said, no, he refused. What? He refused. Yeah. Wait here. He pressed the buzzer. He was allowed entrance into the headmaster study. He was away for three or four minutes.

He came back out and he said, it's all right. You have the money. I said, what? What? What did you do? What did you say? And he said, I resigned. Really?

This is like a play. It is extraordinary. isn't it? He said to the headmaster, I resign my position if you don't get this boy this money. So a totally fulcrum moment in my life. And so, you know, no pressure. I went off to take the exam. And beyond belief, yes, I was awarded an open scholarship exhibition at Downing College, Cambridge. In some sense, the rest is history. Well, the rest is history because I didn't fully realize it at the time. But Cambridge was the university, almost uniquely the university that provided so many talents into the theatre business, the comedy business.

Footlights. It just was a tradition, Cambridge footlights. But there was a group, a student, theatre group called the Cambridge Marlowe Society, big Cambridge joke because it was the group who did the Shakespeare plays. Oh, I see. And a group called the ADC, the amateur dramatic club. It's still called the ADC. And absolutely thrilling.

the number of people that I found myself working with a boy called Ian McKellon, had a boy called Derek Jacoby. I mean, how lucky can you get? How lucky can you get? Yeah, absolutely. It really is a, it sounds like a plot for a screenplay. In the footlights, there was a boy in my college who clearly wanted to do some, he had a yearning to do something comedically, but he was very, very uncertain.

and very nervous, came to me once and said, do you think somebody like me could have anything to do with the theatre? And I said, look, I think you should join this group called the Footlights. And he auditioned. And in the end, a year later, I cast him in the Footlights Review that I was directing. And by then, he'd started to do comedy material with another guy, in Europe from a different college.

And they were called John Cleese and Graham Chapman. I mean, they were doing Monty Python material at that time. They were so different from anybody and everybody else and outrageous. It's amazing the collection. I guess it's happened in physics too, by the way, that there's this period of ferment where, you know, they're great scientists, but I think they're also great because they were surrounded by others who helped push them or motivate them. And this was, you know, this, either you,

Michael, Jacobi, Jacoby, Cleese, Chapman, I know, I know Eric Eidel who was there then too. And other people who become literature, we've talked to Stephen Greenblatt, who's now a well-known Shakespeare scholar, among many other things, who was there and told me he was in the footlights. It's just an amazing, it's an amazing group of, and I did, so was it, surely the, the presence of all these others must have had some other impact on you. It was extraordinarily invigorating. And I treated my university career as a kind of weekly repertory theater. I mean, I think I was involved in one way or another in 34 productions while I was at university. I mean, sometimes acting, sometimes just playing a very small part,

sometimes directing, sometimes devising and working on. But, I mean, it was absolutely non-stop activity. Absolutely three. Now, that was a dangerous thing to be doing because I was studying sitting at the feet of one F.R. Levis, Dr. Levis. I don't know whether that name has come down to you.

But I mean, it was a very, very famous name at the time. He was the most potent and eccentric literature critic. He wrote several books like Revaluation and the Common Pursuit that sort of really changed the landscape of how we think about the English novel and how we think about the great tradition of English poetry. and so on. He was very, very extraordinary, very eccentric, very demanding.

And you were doing well he plays. To be able to get into his group, you see, he taught it down in college, my college, there were just 12 of us. So not surprisingly, we were known as the disciples. And we would literally sit at his feet. I mean, he sat in a decaying horsehair armchair. in a large room.

And we all sat around on the coconut matting, listening to his very droll stories, his very sly jokes, and his extraordinary, extraordinary opinions and revelations. But, I mean, he was also rebellious. So, I mean, on day one, we all went into that room incredibly nervous.

and he was sitting in the corner and it was indicated we should sit down and he was reading some pale blue papers and the silence became deafening as he went on reading reading and then he threw the papers over his shoulder what was he doing and he looked at this and he said well gentlemen that was my copy of the syllabus, you may do with yours whatever you wish. So instantly, the very first thing, there's somebody saying, this is not about exams, this is not about towing the line, this is not about a system, this is about your predilections, this is about how you respond. the last people in the world you would expect to be able to understand that would be a group of actors.

I mean, he knew that I got this passion and he made digs in my direction. But no, my misbehavior was that I should have been producing an essay, a major essay once a week, and a lot of written work twice a week. And I was not achieving that. And I think he was fully aware that I was not achieving that. And amazingly, he'd let it go. You let it go.

Now, I wonder whether, to some extent, and I'm sure actors will disagree with me, but at some extent, what I might imagine that directing is more cerebral in some sense, or at least more closer to the work of literature. I mean, when you're studying literature or you're analyzing the works of authors. And of course, to direct, that's exactly what you have to do in some sense, right?

You have to look at the author, imagine, to some extent, intent and context. So at least it seems more academic, but I don't know. Is that what attracted you, or is that what? Analysis is hugely, hugely important. Yeah, sure. With any text, be it a great classic text or a play that, lands on your doormat because someone's pushed it through the front door, you read that script. You're immediately involved in analysis. You're trying to uncover meaning and purpose and structure.

Of course you are. And especially with new work, you're. You're also involved in, through analysis, you're involved in assessments of practicality. Practicality about size of caste, about doubling and trebling of roles, about design, and therefore about budget. So one kind of analysis moves you towards another. But the directorial process is only to some extent that because the rehearsal room is a place where indeed teaching goes on. I mean, there is the necessity frequently for director to be a teacher.

but director must be open to being taught. There's so much that comes to you that you learn from your colleagues and therefore you're adjusting. And of course, you also have to be, to some extent, a psychiatrist, the psychologist, the psychoanalyst, because you're dealing with different people, under different kinds of pressure and what are they concealing and what are they revealing and

and how helpful are their moods to this process and so on and how insightful. Then of course what you're doing is discovering character and meaning together. There is a much more recent tradition of the concept production. The concept production, which is directorial diktat. It reaches us really via the Russian theatre to the East German theatre, so I'm going back some decades,

and then over into the rest of Europe, where the director can say, yes, there is this famous play, but what we are now concerned with is my version of this famous play. And so I see it as. And because I see it as, this is my concept, then everybody must be told, you must do. So discovery is no longer part of it. Dictat is part of it. You do it like this, you do it like this, in order to fulfill my concept. you will gather that is not a process that I'm happy. Yeah, I was going to say it's clearly not a half process.

I've often been interested in the relationship between collaboration and creativity and a variety of fields like music and art and literature and theater compared to science because it's interesting. People don't think necessarily if science is collaborative, but it is completely that with a give and take. And the process you describe as a director, in fact, does remind me of the, of the best of what can happen with graduate students as a physicist, where it's, of course, there's teaching,

but there's a tremendous amount of learning and give and take and unexpected results that come, which I think is the most probably, I wonder, for you, as a director, I know as a scientist, for me, the most exciting thing is the unexpected results that come of that. That I thought we were starting here and we end up over here. Similar things for you? Oh, very, very similar.

And I guess a number of scandalous stories that have reached us, haven't they, that a Nobel Prize is awarded, but actually several people were very much part of the process. Well, it's off in the way. I mean, one person is awarded it. And more recently, we know that women scientists have had a hugely much more important role than has been. designated in terms of awards or fame. So, yeah, I'm very, very aware of the scientific collaborative process. I have a son who is a scientist who talks about his team constantly.

And although he's very much the leader of the team, he likes to feel that he's part a team. Yeah, but it's interesting. You say that because science is collaborative, it's built on teams. And you're right, although it's been surprising, amazing to me, how certain awards have ended up going to people who are nevertheless really good, even though they represent a collaboration and they're able to do what they've been able to do because of the collaboration, they themselves are really quite capable. But the interesting thing is similar things happen, if not more so, in theater and film, which is a culture, a celebrity, after all, where in some sense, awards are given,

but the whole, for director or best actor or whatever, but presumably it's almost exactly the same way, that they wouldn't be able to do what they did or without that collaboration. And so there are many people who go on Sun. It's kind of a necessity these days, isn't it, for anybody receiving an award for their speech to begin with, this is not for me, it's for everybody involved.

And I want to pay tribute to the whole group the whole team and then that nightmare that people have at the microphone where they fear they're going to forget names. Yeah, sure. And always somebody gets left out and so. But of course, that is absolutely accurate that theater, cinema, and in so many cases, musical musical work is

collaborative. Whole teams of people are involved and one can't exist one achievement can't exist without the other. But we do seem to live in this culture of celebrity that is intriguing, especially intriguing. I remember reading in ancient times ancient Rome in particular

that that that it was a totally different world, that the artist was separated from the art. That people could love the art and just say, well, the artist was some divinely inspired, but that the artist doesn't matter. It's the art. So the playwright doesn't matter, it's the play.

And we just live in different times, although, although I think it was, I think Stephen Greenblatt was telling me in Shakespeare's time, he's sort of sad as a scholar, historian, literary historian, that, in fact, it was that way, that no one bothered to preserve many of Shakespeare's things. The plays were great, but Shakespeare himself wasn't too. Now, now Stephen Greenblatt and you, you're getting onto the huge subject.

To some extent, science is now having something to do with it, which is the identity of William Shakespeare. And because relatively few artifacts, relatively few bits of physical evidence about Shakespeare's life and lifetime have survived. It leads people to question, well, you know, was it really him? Did somebody else do the work? Did he just cash in at some point? Now, quite a lot of that is to do with English snobbery.

It's to do with the idea that a boy, who was, who grew up in a very small town and who was educated at a grammar school and then did not go to university and then went to London. How could he, how could he possibly have the range and the vocabulary and the understanding, particularly when it's to do with stories concerned,

nobility, concerning royalty, concerning politics, and so on. What those people who argue that it would have to have been an aristocrat who wrote those things, what they never include is all the extraordinary stuff in the plays of Shakespeare about working people about, you know, the Boer's Head, the low life in London, the drunks, the criminals. Again and again and again, Shakespeare in the plays has an understanding of working people very early on, that extraordinary speech about the shepherd's life. And when people say, no, no, no, no, it must have been the Earl of Oxford. And you think, okay, so how did the Earl of Oxford get all of that info about, you know,

what life was like in the East End and what life was like out in the fields and so on. nobody of course wants to pursue that argument and of course of course genius is inexplicable yeah Mozart is inexplicable I mean how could it have happened how can that amount of output of of absolutely non-stop genius occur when somebody dies at age 34, it's beyond explanation. It's unfathomable. But what is overwhelmingly obvious is, number one, more things survive about William Shakespeare than survive about Christopher Marlowe or Webster or Toonaer or Middle-Doh.

I mean, almost nothing survive about those dramatists, a bit more about Ben Johnson. But Ben Johnson was, according to legend, a great friend of William Shakespeare. Ben Johnson was somebody who, in his work, lacerated anything and everything to do with hypocrisy and to do with double standards and to do with deceit. Ben Johnson, after Shakespeare died, it's several years after Shakespeare died, two actors try to put together the works of William Shakespeare in a publication that we now know as the first folio.

and Ben Johnson is asked to write the foreword. Ben Johnson writes a passionate foreword in verse. So not anything tossed off in a hurry. Written in verse, where he refers not just to Shakespeare, but to my Shakespeare. And for the first time ever in Shakespeare, That passage he calls Shakespeare swan of Avon. Oh.

Now, how and why would Ben Johnson the scourge of deceit write that in the knowledge that really, really, they were all written by the Earl of Oxford, whose family was a little bit embarrassed about being involved with something as low life as the theatre. and therefore, would you mind very, very, very much? I mean, it's just completely tosh. Well, that's great. I mean, it's, yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that Shakespeare wasn't the author of the place, but now that we've dispensed with that. Well, but no, actually there's one more,

and I said that it's becoming scientific. Very recently, computer science is now able to, assess the regularity of word use and phrase use in ancient documents. And so a conclusion has been reached scientifically that the writer who overlaps in phraseology and vocabulary most with the works of William Shakespeare is Francis Bacon, the essayist Francis Bacon. Suddenly now there is a theory of, ah, just a minute, Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Now, here's the thing.

When you read the essays of Bacon, they are indeed linguistically wide-ranging, They are articulate. They are extraordinarily dry. They are extraordinarily humorless. And they involve no sense whatsoever of human character and human contradiction. Irony. And so on. So what in the end you're left with is your instinct,

that you're reading something that comes from a certain kind of mind, a certain kind of person, a certain kind of observation, a certain kind of perception. And it isn't that kind. It's this kind. Now, I don't care how much computer science

tells me that there is an overlap between one and the other that isn't an overlap in the experience. There isn't an overlap in the genius. Well, in fact, that's actually an interesting issue, which I haven't think about and we'll probably deal with in various discussions I want to have, which is, you know, to the extent that AI can be, can, can not be programmed, but can learn that. For example, I was just thinking when you're talking, I was just

reading this week that a, that the first book written completely by a computer was produced, and it was just turgid and awful, which should make writers feel, but the point is that there's a big difference between analyzing frequency of words or even analyzing it and actually having irony and humor and those things. So it's going to be a long time, I think, before we can imagine. But the question is, will that transition be made when artificial intelligence can ultimately detect genius, humor, irony? I'm insufficiently knowledgeable about artificial intelligence. I'm only a sufficient. knowledgeable to be alarmed and petrified about where it might be headed, particularly when I get the stories that a computer composed something by Bach, as it were, and something by Mozart, and then great musical experts are collected together to listen and to try to define which one was written by the real composer and which one was written by the computer. and they seem to get it wrong on a very, very regular basis.

I mean, that's very, very, very alarming. Well, I guess it's alarming in one sense, but, you know, only if you, only if you, I kind of, one can have that attitude, but at the same time, one can have the attitude, well, that means there's great potential. Maybe these computers can eventually write music that's different and more interesting and will enhance, you know, that may not, whether you call it better or not, sufficiently different, that it will enhance the scope of what we can experience in music and maybe ultimately the literature. Indeed, it could be, and it could help enormously in musical education.

But there's something that I wanted to add about Shakespeare, something that sets him apart. I was just talking about Ben Johnson. Johnson, as people know, wrote a play called Every Man in His Humour, and then wrote a play called Every Man Out of His Human, is humor and so humor, humors, how Johnson described human nature. You were a certain type. That's the same as Comedia Delata. You could be a pantaloney type. You could be a harlechino type. You could be a young lover type. You could be a jealous husband type. You could be a miser type.

Yes. Johnson writes plays about the humors. People are different types. Shakespeare and nobody else is doing it writes plays about entirely three-dimensional people who are contradictory, who have subtext in everything that they, and from very, very, very, early on in his career. Shakespeare is saying what we say isn't necessarily what we mean. What we say can be because we're trying to hide something. What we say publicly

isn't what we necessarily would go for or reveal privately. Shakespeare is writing psychologically several hundred years before Freud began to define how psychology, psychiatry, what works in us. And therefore, there is no problem at all about being in a rehearsal room with a group

of actors, contemporary actors, who want to examine a Shakespeare text for its psychological ingredients, there's no embarrassment. There is so, so much possibility. Because that's how he observes. He observes the whole range and contradiction of human nature. And when I was talking to Wienblatt, and of course the concede of his last book, Tarrant, was he also anticipates,

just by that, when you talk about deceit, that the notion of how people become tyrant successfully, how a population can allow themselves to serve under tyrant, the notion that deceit and deception is such a key part of it is very fascinating when you think of Shakespeare. And of course, one can't help but think of the modern connections. Well, in many ways of Shakespeare, but of course, deceit and deception being such a crucial part

of what is now a great threat to democracy, or at least the possibility that democracies can be overwhelmed by tyrannies. It's really... Well, or overwhelmed by AI. Yeah, well, maybe. I mean, exactly. Somebody has postulated already what astonishing use could Stalin have made of...

where we currently are with algorithmic science, and how there is then the possibility that an entire population can be programmed. I mean, first of all, because of what they watch and what they see and what they receive through their computers and their telephones, but then eventually through little implants that we can all be, programmed to behave exactly as the great dictator demands. It is very scary. I mean, I was in Russia at the very end of the communist era, the Brezhnev era.

And I remember in Moscow once walking in a park and a vast... queue, a vast line sort of five deep of people, were progressing through. And eventually they were going to walk past Lennon's tomb. And I walked past this long, long, long line of five deep people. Yeah, I've been in Lennon's tomb. Nobody was speaking to anybody. It was like you were walking past zombies. Truly, truly.

There was no levity. There was no discussion. There was no murmuring. There was no whispering. Just people shuffling forward, looking straight ahead with a face of grimness. And had I have had a mobile phone in those days, I would have taken pictures. And it would have been so, so alarming that a population, that number of people could be brought to that kind of mindless docility.

Well, you know, I have to say, I think having, I was in Russia in the 60s. and of course have known many people, including physicists who left Russia and wrestled so in the, I would say let me put on a rare optimistic hat because I don't have that hat very often. In two cases, related to the things you said, one of the things that I think was good about, in the former Soviet Union,

everyone knew the propaganda was propaganda. I mean, they saw Pravda. They knew they never believed it. They had to, they had to the line. Proved of the truth. Yeah, the proff to the truth. But they had to tow the party line for various reasons, but no one believed it, I think. And so, and it was, unlike.

I challenge your word, no one. Well, okay. I recognize many, many, many, many, many. Okay, well, I guess many of the, if there were Shakespeare play, I think one would imagine that there'd be scenes where the barmen would be talking out back and they'd be making fun of the nobleman or in this case, the dictator. Because in the privacy, when there was privacy, I suspect there were a lot of such such discussions that Shakespeare might have picked up on.

Well, it's interesting, again, you mentioned Shakespeare, because he did write politically. Of course. For somebody to set up that early in his career to write a history cycle that ends up with the establishing of the Tudor dynasty. Okay, many scholars will say, yes, and, you know, the plays are,

in a sense, simplistic in declaring, you know, at last, at last, we have arrived at the great Tudor dynasty and we're still in the great Tudor dynasty and the Tudor dynasty will last forever and so on. Actually, when you think twice about it, you realize that Shakespeare is saying, look, the pathway to the Tudor dynasty is incredibly tangled. It's full of illegitimacy, full of ongoing conflicts about who had the right to inherit

what. And questionably, by the time you get to Bolingbroke overturning Richard the second, I mean inheritance is completely out of the window. So Shakespeare is on very, very, very, very

tricky ground, and when he writes Richard the 2nd, which is not early on in his career, he's writing about a king being deposed by partly a noble but partly a populist movement. I mean, that is so dangerous for Shakespeare to be doing at a time when Elizabeth is being challenged by Mary Queen of Scots and various other claimants to the throne. And Shakespeare follows it through and has Richard II dethroned in a prison. Yeah. And eventually, eventually Richard II sort of discovering a kind of humanity and insight that he never had before. Throughout history, either in satire or fiction, you can hide political commentary with a little safety.

Just like you can in science fiction, you can include things that you could never, the first interracial kiss was in Star Trek, for example, that you can embed the political commentary in fiction in a way that presumably is safer than just writing the commentary, much safer, I guess, even in that time. I'd absolutely take your point. I mean, Shakespeare was writing history plays where to say, some extent he's saying, look, these are documentaries. I mean, hey, folks, this is what happened. There's a sort of dangerous element of that. But yes, absolutely. I mean, it's a lot of tradition.

Science fiction so, so excitingly takes us to all. I mean, the science fiction of 25 years ago is already coming true. Well, some of it. I actually think having written about science. I think the most remarkable thing about science fiction is that it misses the most important developments. Very few people talk about the internet. They talk about flying cars now, which we don't have, but no one pointed, you know, very few people. Watch the space. Yeah, yeah. So I think that what the wonderful thing about the real world, and I do think is that it's stranger than fiction and that we can, with our imaginations, imagine a future. And it's, and there'll be some things that will match, but the most important things that will never anticipate. That's why as a scientist, by the way, that's why I do science,

right? If we knew it because if we knew it was going to happen, it wouldn't be so interesting, I think, as the fact that discoveries change everything. Yeah. And of course, no one scientist or no group of scientists can have an influence on what to promote and what to freeze, what's good for us, and what's not, because everything moves forward down in accessible pathways all the time we have to find out more developed, more take it further. But there is a growing question, isn't there, which is a moral question rather than a scientific one. I mean, if we acknowledge now, I mean, I've mentioned this to you before, but if we acknowledge now that science could take us to a world where virtually nobody has a job, nobody has a function.

Yeah. Therefore, it is necessary for the world's population to be sedated and to be told what to do and to be provided with entertainment. And then as science says, and you can live to the age of 150, or no, actually the age of 200, actually we're just at the point of eliminating death. You can live eternally. We have the possibility,

maybe even the probability of a vast species population that have been transformed into numbers, into morons, into a kind of nothingness, to the point where Aldous Huxley, brave new world, could be coming true, an entire population sedated and just hanging around looking at screens. Well, you know, the possibilities of future are terrifying. That's why, and they're also exhilarating, and that's why life is, in my mind, with living. It could be, it could be un-im-I remember, I've given some commencement addresses, and I always wanted to begin one with a commencement address I read, and it's been unattributed.

Some people think Kurt Vonnegut, but he says no, where he began by saying, things are going to get unimaginably worse, and they're never, ever going to get better again. I thought, what a wonderful way to agree to Christ, but it sounds like what a good to me. Yeah. But I think the point is that, well, that may be true, but it doesn't have to be the true. Nothing is written, and it could be, and they're terrifying, possibilities. I can, an alternative version of that, which is, which I first heard a spouse by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, but, but referring to the economist Keynes talked about the industrial evolution and machines, as, you know, clearly it could take people's jobs away.

And there's no doubt that AI will replace most jobs. But, so that could lead to an, a miserable world, but it could also lead to a world where, where the, where, where we're free to spend, to spend our time in coffee house is talking about Shakespeare, listening to music, and doing the things we want to do. So there are lots of... If anybody said to me that we're in a world of AI and we can create all our own plays, all our own drama, all our own movies, and honestly, you're absolutely fine.

You can sit in a chair and talk about Shakespeare. I mean, of course, I would blow my brains out. I mean, because if one's aware of those thrilling possibilities, of work and into connection with other people. You never, never, never want to lose them. But I do sometimes fantasize, and I know that I'm in a territory of science fiction. But the world tried to come together with this notion of the United Nations,

that representatives of countries or that can get together and can try to establish world peace, can try to somehow control wild behavior and disallow unfairness between nations and so on. And it's had a very checkered history. We're not good at taking moral decisions. decisions on behalf of the rest of us. But I kind of dreamed that we need to go one stage further now than the United Nations.

We need to have, and this sounds very scary, we need to have a small group of wonderfully, wonderfully enlightened minds who are allowed to make the moral judgments about the future And to say, yes, it is fascinating this kind of science, but actually we're now going to put stock to that. Because it is going to turn us all into warons. And this kind of science, you're not allowed to develop nuclear bombs anymore. I mean, we've already been there. I just made a film about it.

But is there a need for some kind of, moral override. And I know I'm getting very, very close to religion, some sort of godlike group who will say this is allowed and this is not allowed. But I fear we're going to need it. Well, you know, I mean, you're not the first, right? Desire for Enlightened Dictators goes back to Play-Dor before. I think that, but I guess I'm less,

hopeful that because I think the most exciting things that happen are unforeseen. I think a group of people trying to imagine a future just will inevitably get wrong, no matter how smart or talented they are. Moreover, again, I'll take that not the devil's advocate, but the optimist's advocate in this case, just for fun. Everything you discussed is possible. I also think, though, that through developments,

including AI, we can imagine a future that's just different. And maybe there's no doubt being human will be different, but it doesn't always mean it's worse. Let me give you an example. If that small enlightened group are guiding it. Well, maybe AI. Maybe AR is the one who should guide it because that may be certainly, and in fact, I suspect that will be the future, but whether it's for better or worse. But let me give you an example that goes back to storytelling, and then maybe we'll get to something you just touched on. That is at the time in ancient Greece, when writing was first being incorporated generally,

Plato and others decried it and said that it will be the end of storytelling. Because storytelling requires an oral tradition, which requires memory, and people won't have memories. And the whole idea of stories will just be go out the window if you can write them down. And of course, if without writing, we wouldn't have had Shakespeare, at least you and I wouldn't have had Shakespeare. And so I suspect that we can imagine a miserable future that isn't so miserable. It's just different. So let's, but let's, let's move to, well, we could debate that all very long. Okay, but let's go back. But you said you were beginning to be, well, some of the things you said about Shakespeare, and then this question of being almost religious or biblical,

the fact that Shakespeare understood humanity, there's a quote from you that I want to, that I like, you said that Shakespeare was your religion. You said, Shakespeare has more wisdom and insight about our lives, about how to live and how not to live, how to forgive and how to understand our fellow creatures than any religious tract, 100 times more than the Bible. I'm sorry to say that, but over and over again in the plays there's an understanding of the human condition that doesn't exist in religious books. I find that absolutely right, although I don't see why one should be sorry to say that.

Of course, when I did say that, and I meant what I said. said, and I stand by what I said, and I'll explain. But I was, of course, in receipt of a torrent of abuse. I don't know why. And I was, I was, I think before I began on that paragraph, I did say that I entirely respected anybody and everybody's right to believe in their religious pathway and whatever gods made sense to them. I was brought up going to Sunday school. I was therefore part of the sort of church community. I became a Clare Boy, I became a server and communion.

I then became qualified to take communion. I became the cross-bearer. I would read the lesson. We are being cross. And then one day, just the contradictions of it all, the impossible contradictions that we're confronted with in religious texts just overwhelmed me. It took to the point where I became almost convulsed, and it was in the middle of a service, and another huge contradiction had just occurred.

And I found myself leaving with my robes, with my white and black religious robes. I went to the vestry, I hung them up, I went out, got on my bike, and I never went back. And you really do have to close. close your mind to endless, impossible contradiction to believe in, well, certainly in the Old Testament and New Testament faiths. Sure. I think it's true generally. But I've wanted to find out more.

So I'm not sure how many people outside Islam can say this, but I have read the Quran from beginning to end and discovered how extraordinarily it reflects the Old Testament in all its early statements. and then how as a religious tract, it's repeatedly full of advice about what is allowed between one family and another or in your village life or who you are allowed to marry and so on. I mean, there's a set of rules that is embedded in the work for a particular community at a particular time. Yeah.

And so when I compare those works, those tracts, and I mean, the New Testament is full of extraordinary stories. And some of the Old Testament contains supposedly historical, events that are fascinating. Even so, when I consult Shakespeare almost on any random page, I will find an insight about our condition that is more complex, that is more understanding, that is less, judgmental about about who we are and how to attempt to live together in community or indeed worldwide.

Well, let me jump there because I think that I want to have a few more questions for you that that bring us in some sense from Shakespeare to today. that what given that taking that thought with Shakespeare and hopefully some playwrights today what can theatre do in the current times what what can theatre accomplish

in the modern world that you see is enlightening or helpful for for us to at least reflect on our current circumstances what you're asking a very very fundamental question about theatre and of course

To some extent, it applies all the way back to the Greek dramatists. It definitely applies to Shakespeare that theatre responds to a contemporary world. Theater takes up issues, moral debate, political debate of the time, frequently. disguised in works of history, in works that refer back to earlier generations, but the plays are saying, does this ring a bell with you? Because isn't this to some extent what's happening now? And the judgments that we're making in this play, do you understand these are judgments we could or should, or shouldn't be making. Shakespeare is constantly referring to a contemporary world.

Now, through the 19th century, the theatre became ever more a leader in how we define society. I mean, there is the strict morality of 19th century Victorian society being challenged by Ibsen who has Nora walking out on her husband and her children

because she is treated as an object not as a fully fledged human being and it's the first overwhelming feminist work I mean, Shakespeare wrote feministically many, many times, and I don't, by the way, believe that those parts were all played by boys, but that's another big, big, big question. But shockwaves when Ibsen wrote that.

And of course, there were censorship groups all over Europe in this country. It was called the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Chamberlain's office, could regulate what was allowed to be seen and not. And of course, the Lord Chamberlain's office said, you can't see Ibsen's players. They are disgusting. They are lonesome. They are immoral.

Strimburg then went on and did even more, challenging the idea of marriage, challenging male behavior, and indeed sometimes challenging female behavior. but very confrontationally about society. As we get into 20th century, George Bernard Shaw is writing politically, writing in Major Barbara a play about the obscenity of armaments and at a time when he should be subscribing

to the whole idea of empowering your nation with more and more weaponry. I mean, shocking, shocking. Harley Granville Barker, who was a contemporary of George Bernard Shaw, and I've just amazingly had the experience of doing a Harley Granville Barker play that has been discovered just recently,

and I did the world premiere of it last year, that would never, never have been given performance permission by the Lord Chamberlain, a play that's 120 years old and we've just done it for the first time because it's about a woman who feels she has the right to walk out on a marriage, she has no rights of divorce, she has the right to take up with another lover and not be judged by society, but she is judged by society, she's beyond the pale, she has the right to go away with that lover and live in another country and work as an artist.

then decree that that is not working out and then take another lover. I mean, Barker is writing at the turn of the century something that would never, never have been given performance. Now, at the moment, as we get more and more and more up to date, theater is more and more the leader of the agenda rather than responding or rebelling theater and to some extent cinema but I would say most of all theater

is saying you might find this outrageous but we are doing things things differently and we're writing about different things. More, with more freedom than film. Well, maybe because the budgets are... I would say, you know, because of the certificate system to some extent is still with us, and films are hugely expensive and therefore you can't deliberately decide to go for a very small audience because of the...

Or risk confronting the current moral whatever. At the moment, the agenda would be spelled A-G-E-N-D-E-R. I mean, everything to do with gender, everything to do with sexual inclination is now absolutely central to the work of So, I mean, you know, for many decades past, people have bravely written about gay relationship and gay rights and have won through repeatedly. And then that entered the cinema. And now there is absolutely no possibility that people can. can get away with homophobic reaction.

But currently, we are concerned with gender, partly because of the huge influence of the Me Too movement and all of the different movements that are akin to it that really do demand that the woman should be at the centre of the story should be in some way controlling or judging or defining the story because we can't any longer subscribe to an idea of any sort of male domination, male decision making and women being subservient to that. So hugely, hugely plays concern that subject, but also, gender in the sense of defining gender, cross-gender.

Are we any longer satisfied that there is just male gender and female gender when we know that people can be immensely uncomfortable being defined as one or the other, and why not be defined as both and so on? Drama is beginning to present that. And a great deal of the time present that through casting. A lot of the time, roles that have always been associated with male performance are now being cast with the female performer. So just recently, I know in New York, there is my colleague Glenda, Glenda Jackson playing King Lear. but just recently in London,

Richard II has been played by a woman. Hamlet has been played by a woman. In Stratford, I used to run the Royal Shakespeare Company, so in Stratford, they are about to do, or possibly even have done, a production of the Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio is played by a woman and Kate is played by a man,

so that the control is at the opposite way, around. Now, all of that is reflecting where we are, is leading where we are. That's all absolutely splendid and right and is doing with the theatre what the theatre has always done. Every time when that has occurred, there is a swing of the pendulum. The pendulum takes takes us more and more and more to this shocking or, or, to an extreme. Rebellious extreme and then the pendulum begins to swing back. Are you suggesting you, I think at the moment, at the moment, the pendulum is swinging very, very, very far round. to the, my only point being, if every entertainment, if every play subscribes to the same notions,

then audience begin to fit or are in danger of feeling that wherever they go, whatever they do, they're seeing the same thing. And so their visits need to be just regular. You worry when people subscribe to whatever the current moral. Of course, of course, of course, we want the theatre to go on challenging to be at the boundary all the time, to push, push the boundary, to go beyond the boundary. But if they're all pushing, then no one's pushing in some sense. It's very, very difficult at the moment to do a production of a Shakespeare play. with any sense of the gender casting that Shakespeare probably had in mind when he wrote it.

That's a fascinating question. I'd love to talk about it longer. We don't have time right now, but let me... No time. What's going on? Unfortunately, an airplane beckons. But no, but there's two things I want to touch on. And we can continue our conversation in this regard in another way. In terms of you hit one current area.

Let me just say we're living in time. We're speaking in Britain right now and Brexit is happening. And I was going to ask how you thought plays might reflect Brexit. And I think there's another quote of yours I found, which is personally I think the merchant of Venice is relevant for Brexit because it tests the character of a person who made a terrible deal and whether he will go through with exacting the terms of that contract. And so I gather you reflect that's exactly the dilemma that the United Kingdom's in right now.

Well, many of the things that we have talked about touch on the idea of democracy. And in an increasingly AI world, what is the meaning of democracy if a population can be controlled towards one inclination? or another, what is meant by a democracy. Now, we're not at the moment in the AI world, but we are in a world where it's possible to hugely influence a voting population through social media, through Facebook contact, through anything and everything that arrives on your telephone. And if one group wanting something are more sophisticated or that much more ahead of the game in how they use those techniques,

they can subvert what might have been in the old days' democracy into what we can influence a vote frequently without truthful argument. And you're suggesting, I think that's what's happened in Brexit. We're talking about politics for centuries, aren't we? But that people don't necessarily tell the truth. And people manage to get votes for what they stand for by all kinds of methodology. But unquestionably, what was promoted as Brexit three years ago,

what was promoted as this is all straightforward, and it's simple, and here are all the benefits to the point where millions will become instantly free for our own National Health Service and all this horror of immigration will all disappear and we will all have all the jobs that we were, and so. was completely erroneous, and the people who promoted it knew that it was erroneous.

They absolutely knew that they were influencing millions and millions of people with false information. And they were also very clever at referring to any counter-argument as fearmongering. Interesting. And so But people who opposed Brexit who believe that it is a wonderful thing that Europe now exists where it's impossible for Europe to go to war

because the last few hundred years have been the history of Europe going to war with each other, with each other, with each other absolutely non-stop. We must get beyond that and share our cultures and share our background and share our enlightenment. For those of us who think that, to be accused that we were scaremongering is very hard to take. So it's not surprising that the system has completely ground to halt. Democracy at the moment is incapable of resolving it because...

Well, living in the United States, I have to say, I feel the similarities, of course, are eerily haunting. Do you let me say... I know from having talked to scientists that many concerns about recommendations, and Europe, but from an artistic perspective, just besides the potential harm to the country, from an artistic perspective, from a theater perspective, do you see a, you're also concerned about Brexit in that sense as well? At every level to do with enlightened European funding for all kinds of projects, towns, cities, long-term projects,

that European funding has been brilliant for so much of that. I think a lot of people will realize how much comes from Europe. Oh, absolutely. And that will all disappear. But, of course, what will diminish is the extent to which we share and the extent to which we exchange. Exactly. When what we should be doing is sharing more and exchanging more.

more. It's always this. And of course, just personally, I love going over to France. There's a wonderful, wonderful machine that's been invented in the 21st century called the

Eurostar. And you walk into a railway station in the middle of London. You just pop through two little instant passport controls. It takes you 10 minutes. and you get on a train and you walk off the other end in Paris. It's taken you two and a quarter hours.

There's no sense that you cross borders. You're absolutely at one with all of the people in Paris, particularly this weekend. And that is all going to change. That is all going to be. Well, if you are British, you have to be an approach. passport queue and we're not going to hurry you up because you've just left our European Union so you can queue for two and a half hours and then there'll be another passport queue at the other end and we're not sure that we recognize this passport and well as someone is who it will be hell

yeah I guess someone maybe Britain's still holding it against the United States because as someone who goes through past two hour passport cues to come into England now I'm particularly sympathetic to that But let's, the final question I want to ask you is so we've concentrated Shakespeare, but we, but, but we should point out that you, you're, the, the range of theater that you have been involved in is immense. Besides the fact, the original production of cats and Les Miserables, many things for which you've been acclaimed in, won Tony Awards. What, what, uh, what, what haven't you done that you'd like to do? Oh, gosh, that's a big point. I don't want the whole list. That's a very big one.

Well, three years ago, I would have said, I want to complete doing all 37 of Shakespeare's 37 plays, and I've now done that. So I'm very, very, very happy. That's a target. I love developing new music theatre work, and there's a strong connection between working with Shakespeare and working with music theatre,

because in both cases, You're working with rhythmic language, you're working with phrasing, you're working with whether you can afford to pause here or here, you're working with making totally believable character through heightened language, totally believable character through music, through song. And you're doing heightened storytelling in both cases. So it's no accident. I mean, on a number of occasions, I have made one theatre company to do a musical and a Shakespeare. And they perform them in repertoire. So one night the Shakespeare, one night the musical. And I love doing that.

And I love proving that connection. So, yes, lots more music, theatre work. I just weirdly decided that it's about time, having been involved in structuring a lot of shows and working with writers very closely on finished versions of a lot of shows and having written largely by accident a number of lyrics. So I ended up writing the lyrics to a song called Memory in Cats. by accident. And I wrote a song called On My Own In Miserables, Sort of By Accident. And that's happened quite a lot. Just recently, I've thought,

I'm going to write the book and lyrics of a musical. So watch the space. Oh, well, I can't wait to see that. And I hope you'll also expand into, I know you're fascinated by science too, science and theater. I'd love to do something with you together at some point. Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Let me. Now, that was a very good cue that you just gave me because wouldn't it be wonderful with the agenda

to go one stage further and say, where can theater and science co-create? I mean, wouldn't that be thrilling? No, truly. I agree, and that would be wonderful. Beginning for another. Especially because from where you're sitting, you see, you've got headphones on, and you've got a beard, and you've got a very, very strongly receding hairline.

Thank you. I've got to tell you, occasionally you look exactly like William Shakespeare. Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, that's... Beards, receding hairline, but sort of a black coverage just there. Okay, well, that's great. Take the specs off, and there you are. Okay, let's see, motivate your will reborn.

Let's hope so. Let me say, you said something at the beginning, and what was the last Shakespeare play that you directed? I directed a midsummer night's dream. This poetry in this is beautiful, because it occurred to me when I, at the beginning of this dialogue, that the very first play that you saw that excited you was a midsummer night's dream, and I knew the very last Shakespeare play you directed was mid-summer night.

I just can't think of anything more poet. It was partly accidental that I was going to do a production of a midsummer night's dream and a genius colleague of mine called Peterbrook. I finally persuaded to come and do a show at the RSC, and I said, what's it to be? And he said, well, what I really, really would love to do is a midsummer night's dream. And I heard myself say, oh, yeah, wow, that would be wonderful, forget my. And of course, he did a production so famous that nobody wanted to do the play for the next 25 years. So it was sort of accidental that it came late, but I then realized if I can do all 37, I should do it last of all. And not only that, I contacted the theatre in my hometown. And they were very, very thrilled. So I was

able to go back to my hometown and I did my final Shakespeare in the place where I saw my first Shakespeare. Your early life was theatrical. It's clear that you weave theater into your life and it's been a wonderful, it's been wonderful to have a small scene in the play that is your life. William Shakespeare actually wrote those words in King Lear. The wheel has come full circle. I am here. And I'm glad you're here. And thanks again. Thanks, Trevor. Thank you.

Lawrence, thank you so much. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krause, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwurda, and Rob Zeps. Audio by Thomas Amison. Edited by Evan Diamond. Web design by Redmond Media Lab. Animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects and music by Riccolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus. content visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.