 Gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'r cywbeth yn cyfnodol, ac mae'n byw'r gweld i'r fach bod yn gweithio'r Llywodraeth Fylltiad Brith. Rwy'n Yn Ym Mhylchedd y Llywodraeth, Rolyw Kethingham, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio'r perthynau. Mae hynod o'r cyfrannu i'n gweithio'r exibisiwn rwy'n ei ddweud yma sy'n ei wneud ymgolodd, ychydig yn ym 400 yma, mae'n anhyfus oed llawer o'r bethau ym 10. Rwy'n credu i'r pen liquoru o'ch ffyrnu ymddraeth a ymddangosiaeth yn hynny a gwahanolio a'r byd o'n ffrinig. Rydyn ni fyddwn yn ffocws jagaeth môn o'r pethau yn cael ei ei ddechu. Ond yn cymwylo yma ten lle gweld y pethau ar hyn yn cael ei ddoedd yn fath o'r dwylo'n cael ei munud a'r dwedd. Mae'r honno'n adegaeth eich dweud o'r dweud oherwydd iawn i'r holl. A'r eich dweud o'r dwylo na'r dweud o'r dweud o'r dweud. Alwedd arwtig. Rydyn ni'n цiwn iddyn nhw yng Nghymru, sy'n cael ei detgylwydd wedi eich peth bydd yr oedd, ddweud yn Llyfrgell, yn 1970, ac yn y cy接下來 wneud. Mae'r gydag yma eich gwirionedd Aberthaedd, Peter Brook. Mae unrhyw gwybodaeth o gwirionedd wirtholdaeth yn i gôr gwaith, ychydig, ychydig, yw'r cyd-deithas, yn ceisio, ac mae, o rwy'n fyw, yn cyfrifio ac yn cyrraeidio ar gael, rwy'n gwneud ym ddod, mae'n nhw'n cael ei wneud yma ar y cyfrifio a'r cyfrifio ar gyfer yma gwirio pethau ac mae'n rhaid i gydig i fynd i'r newid. Mae'n ganddoch chi'n gwneud ar y Bryn Cymru, mae'n ganddoch i arddangos ar y TVC ac mae'n ganddoch i'r gwirio pethau'r ymdweud, mae'n ganddoch i'n ganddoch i gyd-degas yn ymddangos of launching BBC Four that we were able to show Peter's extraordinary intimate filmed production of his great hamlet with Adrian Lester and even this afternoon Peter, thank you coming coming from Paris we've been working you hard already Peter has delivered a lecture here the skyscraper and if you weren't there this was about the profane and the esoteric in Shakespeare and much much more than that it was filmed recorded I think and we will be making sure that we do make that available for those afraid like me that weren't able to be there but it is so lovely to be able to spend time exploring Shakespeare in this way and I'm delighted to say we have not just Peter here tonight to explore that great Midsummer Night's Dream moment but also three of the original cast members you'll see in a moment Sir Ben Kingsley, Francis de La Tour and Barry Stanton it remains only for me to say that I very much hope you enjoy the evening and to hand to your real host one of the great scholars of Shakespeare in performance the Mcmill family chair in Shakespeare studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana Peter Holland Peter please I'd like to say one word but it's very difficult after what we've just heard for me to say anything because I don't want it to sound tit for tat what I wanted to say here very simply before knowing that you're going to be speaking was that this is the best exhibition I've ever been to and all praise to Zoe and her team for putting it together and it is impossible to introduce the person who for me has since I saw the first of his productions I saw King Lear with Paul Scofield on stage at the Aldwich in 1962 I was of course pushed in in my push chair Peter Brook has been the greatest theatre director of our time so I can't introduce him because what would one say I want to offer two things by way of introduction one is a quotation and the other is a memory so the quotation is unusually from a theater review because theater reviews come and they go and they vanish but some theater reviews deserve to be remembered and I want to quote from the review by Clive Barnes the theater critic of the New York Times who flew over to England in order to see the first night of a Midsummer Extreme at Stratford and his part of his review that he published in the New York Times once in a while once in a very rare while a theatrical production arrives that is going to be talked about as long as there is a theatre a production which for good or ill is going to exert a major influence on the contemporary stage if Peter Brook had done nothing else but this dream he would have deserved a place in theatre history and I admired that as a piece of writing and gosh it was accurate the memory is my own I went up to see the show for a matinee and I drove up from London with my girlfriend and we were running late because the traffic was bad on the motorway and I couldn't find anywhere to park and I left the car on double yellow lines being sure it was going to be towed away and I got into the theatre at about two minutes to two thinking why have I driven a hundred miles even for Peter Brook to see a Midsummer Night's Dream and I came out with a deeper sense of joy and satisfaction and delight and thoughtfulness and every other emotion conceivable than any other production has ever given me before or since for those of you who saw it you'll remember that feeling for those of you who didn't I'm sorry you have no idea what you've missed but there was something peculiarly special about that time in the theatre that filled us with feelings that we didn't know we could have so intensely across that time what we're going to do is Peter and I are going to talk for a little bit and then we'll invite up the cast members to talk rather more but Peter I wanted to ask you about the kind of journey that took you towards wanting to do a Midsummer Night's Dream after all what you had mostly explored in Shakespeare before then had been extraordinary tragedy King Lear before that that revelatory production of Romeo and Juliet that put love over the as you said the Barona sewers or Titus Andronicus where you rediscovered a play that nobody thought was kind of worth doing and you said worth doing it's astonishing and love's labor's lost and love's labor's lost where you found that darkness at the end so so wonderfully so memorable in the descriptions I've read of it dream wasn't a likely play somehow and I'm wondering about what what led you towards that in the journey of thinking about other productions of the play other productions of other plays you've you've done or have been watching or whatever when you know that remains an open question because when one's finished any production there are always friends who come up with suggestions of what you should do and send manuscripts if I've done or do a play check so alas there will be other words people are saying well now you'll do Uncle Vanya weren't you and someone else said no no no it's not nearly as interesting as if you do a Barnaf and so it goes on and of saying with operas I mean the amount of opera sort of and on the contrary I gave up doing opera until we could make our own choice completely but the mystery is that all of that people suggestions even you're looking at things yourself are preparing the way for that marvellous moment which is something that every actor knows so well which is that moment when it happens and I never know how it is out of all those potential things clamoring for attention it's certainly quite clear this is and it's a sense that's why I feel that you have to without it just being a matter of being topical and reading the press and listening to the radio and the TV one has to and by nature one is in touch with the flow of life at each moment and that's what guides one to feeling ah at this moment this is what should be done so in a way one says it's the play that is knocking on the door and this moment when you stop for a moment and can say to come in and I think of work you were doing around that time famously the extraordinary show we never knew quite how to pronounce it was it called us or us which was the point a show about opposition to the Vietnam War which took you in a more strongly explicitly political direction than I think any of your other work in terms of an immediate politics from there to mid-summer night stream it looks like an impossible flip of the coin but it isn't and I wonder about that because it's the same for this moment when we're really in one of the most brutally horrible moments in the cycle of humanity whichever way we look and within it there's a need for something that goes beyond light entertainment we need that but we need something that goes beyond something that in some way can give us a positive feeling and that while all the work of Shakespeare has that this particular masterpiece the mid-summer night's dream is in that direction the richest and the fullest and it was so obvious after this we've made them the film tell me lies and we've been right into the whole vietnam war and people would always say stupidly do you think that you can stop a war with a play in a theatre which is so idiotic it's not worth answering of course not but what we can do is for the people who are there both to live in a new way the intensity of the questions that it puts to us all and at the same time not to go out as you do from the political theatre more angry than when you come in that is monstrous that is you know you're not changing the world but you are doing a disservice to your little world with the audience if the audience comes out feeling worse more angry more frustrated more ready to go out and kick somebody in the balls or break a shop window than when they come in so the shift from that to a supreme masterpiece of Shakespeare but masterpiece in the pure innocence of something that is radiant and that that's what seemed that very moment this is the most radiant play of Shakespeare's but it's a play which in 1970 did not look as though it was radiant i mean you discovered the play that that we all know now is there but it had looked like a little bit of children's you know the play that children most often see is perhaps their first Shakespeare a play that was almost over familiar and you managed to make it so freshly new but i didn't manage to make it it just seemed to me clear that if you have a play on the same adventure it goes to the tip this do you have a play about spirits and if you have a play about fairies a play about imagine with him you can see that in our language thank god the word has been so overused that we don't use it anymore but if you try to come back to what it meant somebody having a soul so nobody's ever painted one people have tried to take photographs of fairies nobody's ever succeeded nobody has actually truly seen a ghost but the sense of a a spirit world that's what drew us into working with people like as from Africa for whom this is self-evident they are brought up and i think Shakespeare was also in a world in the country when the presence the spirit of a tree the spirit of a flower was not a theoretical question that was self-evident and then there were places i think it's the American Indians who when they pull up a plant because they want to use it perhaps for decoration perhaps for cooking apologize just say excuse me and this can make us laugh today but what's behind it is acknowledging the spirit world and here i'd seen because it was a legend you know Max Reinhard was a legend for me and i heard marvelous things about him including the fact of somebody going into one of his rehearsals and thinking to see this dynamic German director at work had just found a man sitting just quietly perched on a stool not saying a word and just watching and so that touched me more than to know that he had managed to build a real forest with a real rabbit and from what i'd seen a fairy was a girl from the local ballet school and a little short skirt jumping around and i thought i didn't have to put those ideas up it just didn't make sense in relation to the fact that this is about a spirit what an invisible world there had been one earlier production i think that treated the play with the same seriousness that you approached it with the same respect and that was Harley Granville Barker's and Granville Barker famously and their photographs in the exhibition of the fairies who wore gold leaf and had strange headdresses and were anything but English fairies and it was as if Granville Barker knew there was something stranger more powerful there than we people before had discovered but he said something that was remarkably prescient he said that actually to doom it's a night stream all you need is a white box in 1913 he anticipated what you went on to discover what what led you to was that already in place in the early stages of thinking about the play the idea that this was going to be very much an empty space that was self-evident but one wanted air and space it's a pity Sally Jacobs isn't here with us today we so wanted her a bit because we worked so closely together i can't say how anything arose but it was quite clear that we wanted not to illustrate in this silly way of illustrating fairies and we didn't want to illustrate night and darkness when the play itself is radiant and so i think that we looked for the instrument that could serve it so we needed doors and we needed steps and we needed this possibility of a world from which the spirits look down and can see what fools we mortals are because they are on the gallery above and so all that was a practical need which Sally then found a way of making harmonious but the whiteness was a way of just saying not forest not decorative but let forest be conjured up in the imagination and it was to have the freedom the imagination which is the essence of Shakespeare because in Shakespeare I found something that since then I've always found it in the in the different traditional countries with storytellers but a storyteller just if he says night fell just that and everybody but that's what the story needs he can then say into that night suddenly came and you're often the story's picking up so it's in that way this elimination of illustration was to free the imagination it sounds like this is more yes the more you strip away the more there is and how do you reach the confidence to allow the audience or encourage the audience to find that imagination you because you're working against the prevailing tendency in theatre at that time yeah but you have to you have to I'm going in a moment to ask our three actors to join us but I want to give the audience a taste of the white box there's as many of you know that the production was fully filmed in Japan but the prints were destroyed I keep hoping that a bootleg copy will somehow appear later there are tiny fragments and our first clip just gives you a taste of that white box and you'll see entering into it this tiny sequence one of the people who's going to join us on stage can we run the first clip John Cain as Park he must talk in a minute about that extraordinary costume Christopher Gable as Lysander and let me invite on stage Demetrius and Helena and snug the joiner in later bottom Ben Kingsley Francis De La Tour and Barry Stanton come and join us I have to say that every time I see that clip I wonder at at John Cain's confidence that you will not hit one of the stilts as you run onto the stage it was tempt can I ask you about just since we've just watched that I mean how you got towards that stage I mean what we really want to talk about is something about the rehearsal journey for this production but this is this must have been a moment of risk taking well I think it started with the urgency with which Peter described storytelling I think one of the most treasured notes during rehearsal and I think Francis probably overheard it was after we had rather ostentatiously and overconfidently rehearsed before lovers scene and dear Peter came slowly towards me and he put his hand on my shoulder and said dear Ben that was absolutely suburban that's the kind of passion and and vigor with which and love with which he wished to redefine at the old versions of storytelling and bring something new so with that with that tough love in the rehearsal room to which I responded joyfully because it's it's always a great a great compliment to say now jump 12 feet now jump 15 and and and the the choreography er which came in fact shockingly late in the rehearsal process but it came out of our relationship to one another David came naturally wishing to look down on us what fools these mortals be it all had a logic nothing was extraneous it all it all docked into the same central beautiful concept of urgently telling a story to the best of our ability and not to be do you have a similar memory of trying to avoid suburbanness um well we had a nearly I think a 10 week rehearsal period which was unheard of and wonderful because that meant that we could not only in rehearsal say our own lines of our own character but we also spoke the lines of of the other characters and I remember reading a few lines of Parkour and that meant that we were beginning to be part of the whole not just me and my character and then there was of course the rehearsals which I we didn't have to do but spin the plates and and there was a period when Peter left for a bit I think he um I don't know what the reason was but just to leave us anyway and just to feel it and get on with it and before he went he said I just want you to think about a few members of the spy that he said what is just think about what is the secret of the play do you remember that yeah and and we were spinning plates and doing our lines and on the trapezes and and we said what is the secret of the play and we came up with hate love love hate ah passion truth and we thought we've got to have an answer because Peter's going to come back soon and he's going to say what is the secret of the play but he didn't ask us that he just left us with the question and in that little bit of rehearsal that that Ben was talking about it was a feeling of are we not quite sure what to do now because Peter had given us or it was there he presented to us this freedom to be able to express it physically which was quite unusual um in English theatre anyway to be physical on stage and I remember getting very upset at one point and thinking I don't I'm just I'm just upset and I remember I was beginning to cry and so I walked back to the back of the rehearsal room and Peter came up to me so sweetly and said what what's what's the matter and I said I I just can't I'm so 70s now but I said I can't feel the love I just I just can't and Peter said well I think you'll find that's exactly what Helena is feeling so he said just try whatever it takes to get your man so we did our scene and that's when I did a kind of rug a tackle on Ben and Ben was wonderful because he just went right here I am flat on my flat on my back this actress is on top of me inward saying the lines of Shakespeare having spent weeks being told rightly by explained and revealed by Peter that it is in the language that you find everything so although it was it was this wonderful contradiction of very physical acting and very clear trying to be anyway saying it with the words we weren't counting rhythms but we were saying it with the words I did at one point say to Peter I don't know how to make rhyming couplets real didum didum didum and Peter said well isn't it wonderful that your character speaks in rhyming couplets so when somebody asks you something you answer in a rhyming couplet oh that's a wonderful talent to have anybody ask you something da da da da da da da da so and it was such a wonderful note because I thought yes how happy some others some can be through assets I am sort of Sarah she one of a memory anyway a bit better than that Barry I think one of the things that that so many people remember of the production was the utter seriousness with which the workers approached their work it could be death if you failed it could presumably I mean that's why it was so keen there's an amazing moment in rehearsal early on in rehearsal when the mechanicals who were the lower class were shoved into a room where we're rehearsing and the door wasn't locked but it was closed there was a sink and hundreds of costumes come and perform before the duke and the Duchess but you must look your best you must do everything you can we spent two hours in that room getting more and more nervous combing our hair over I had hair then combing our hair over and over again and and trying to look slick trying to look like they we thought they would be and then we were shown in to this room which was horrifying in a way because it was filled with candles and they had these extraordinary clothes of feathers and beautiful velvets on and we were really really suburban and we somehow had to get a beyond that and become this play and we were chosen that we kept saying we've been chosen they haven't the other blokes haven't we've been chosen we're the best and that's how we did it and for me that was one of the greatest moments in that whole thing of shoving you into that room and forcing you to get dressed up and comb your hair and it worked and we but you said a wonderful thing that he said ah very very good but I just realized you can't perform comedy in candlelight and that was a very important thing so we played the scene with the lights full up very important and you can't play can you know in candlelight comedy doesn't work I remember how could I forget the lion's head oh the lion's head yeah I was allowed to design that myself yes I the wonderful Sally Jacobs who did the costumes and everything and she allowed me to go up to the workshop and design my own lion's head well what do you do how do you make a lion's head if you're a joiner you make it out of wood and it's it's something like a either chest of drawers or a cupboard so it was between the two so is a lion's head there with a very strange lion's head thing and as I came up I opened the doors and there was the real line inside so that was I loved the lion's head yes it was a line in making I mean it was the I was allowed to make what does what does a joiner feel pride in what he makes yes exactly that yes I was very proud of my lion's head I wanted to take it home and look after it that's true but Barry you spoke of the mechanicals and their sense of being chosen and now the wonderful thing that we experienced with Pisa prior to the rehearsal process is that the whole of the RSC Stratford based company and it was a big company we had a dressing room number 24 I think now it stops at seven or something a huge company anyway we we entered into a workshop for Peter and we we worked together and out of that huge company and thrilling workshop we were chosen that is a marvelous way to start a rehearsal process absolutely you've been already you have the confidence of knowing in that room you'll be you'll be nourished you'll be guided you'll be encouraged you will never be auditioned there's a huge difference yes hence at the reading Peter's technique of using you do that bit you do that bit you do that bit wonderful so you listen to your own lines from somebody else's mouth for the only time in that entire wonderful idea I've used it since always that's great you you had worked with Peter earlier on us us how did that kind of enable you to carry forward I don't think you two had worked with Peter prior to dream I had no and I wonder about the feeling of oh I have a rough idea how this magician operates how the no idea no idea no idea completely different totally different set of organisational rules but what Peter gives you is total freedom absolute total freedom but within very tight lines and that's what an actor needs all the time I think yet do anything you want but within the restriction of this and that's what produces that suction of energy that comes out of you I think and it perfectly suits Shakespeare which is beautifully organised language which you cannot improvise no you can you stay within the eye of your hammer to the rhyming couplet you stay within the beautiful discipline of that language so you have in the white box and you have Peter's and fantastic limits and the writers limits so that we were held in a way you don't rattle around in a vacuum do you that's not freedom it's often misunderstood as being freedom but it is just the concentration in the box yeah alone yeah even for the mechanicals in the forest it was a concentration extraordinarily I'd never worked for them why had you ever worked in a a box like I mean apart from a box set which is boring but that it is your right it's a funnel isn't it a funnel of energy and a funnel of emotion wonderful space to walk on to and they're behind us is is and we we we Peter allowed us when we weren't on stage performing our particular roles to be on the gallery watching so we all remember every line of the play because it's you know it's ingrained it's in our it's a cellular memory because we never went back to our dressing room that was the place to be and you wanted to be oh yeah very much and there is one of those curious kind of wire slinkies that became the trees and could could could make the the forest a dangerous place I I want to pick up that that notion of the precision of Shakespeare's language because one of the things Peter that you had experimented with a little just prior to this as you were moving towards filming King Lear was asking Ted Hughes to as it were translate the play rewrite the play and it's always seemed an extraordinary moment and here is a very great poet confronting the idea of remaking Shakespeare and yet you both realised this was a a false route or was it a necessary stage and we were talking so beautifully earlier about going up in the lift and the different floors was it a necessary floor to go through to get back to what is exciting about the precision of Shakespeare's language. Or the whole guideline in filming King Lear was to make something that's not a photograph to play that is actually bringing King Lear through the language of cinema and the language of cinema is inseparable from the close up and in the close up you're really so close to the thought process but we thought is it possible to do this however well played with a language so far from what for us is a natural language however in the theatre yes the actor can make it seem completely natural but in close up will this so with Ted we said let's make the experiment of seeing whether you can paraphrase it as a very early great poet loving Shakespeare as Ted could do so that imperceptibly that the lines are crystal clear and real because we were going to film it in a realistic setting we went and found in the north of Denmark that great wild lunar landscape which rarely was like Britain must have been in those hundreds of years earlier and so we made the experiment until brought all his talent to it and then we said yes it was worth attempting but in fact whatever the reason this is an acting problem which Paul completely went and seen the film Paul managed to find a way and the intimate close up was making every line completely real to that character that you were watching and with Ted we said no this is really something that was worth attempting just to see but it's something we've got no possibility of doing and we shouldn't and we both think we good that's the end of that but forgotten can I just say his point because you were I was in Lear I was in Lear in Oswald but there's a wonderful moment in Lear when we were talking about Lear there and I said well where are the white cliffs of it it's quite flat around the sky where are the white cliffs of Dover and you said very little oh they haven't been formed yet so the actor goes oh no they haven't been formed yet brilliant answer but it is absolutely for me one of the great films that examines the human face and asks when you look at somebody's face can you know what what that mind behind it is capable of and I remember one of the great decisions you make in the film that after Gloucester's blinding we don't see Gloucester's face we see the face of Cornwall who has done this but that's that's the face we want to look at we don't want to see Gloucester's up and want to know how could somebody be willing to do that I mean I just think that there is something about the way in that which that presents faces and one of the things and not as you mentioned this way in which this production of dream presenting bodies an intense physicality and I again it's alien to the English way of doing Shakespeare to have bodies running around the stage and being athletic in that way and physical and aware of themselves in that way what was going on in the rehearsal room I mean you all turned into athletes it became inevitable didn't it that we hit those targets that that are demanded of us when we wish to present something to an audience that is profoundly thrilling and beautiful and will leave them feeling better not worse as Peter said this afternoon so that you you another great thing Peter said in the rehearsal room was that this is a good example of how Peter gives his actors great confidence he told a story about a group of actors with whom he was working presented with ancient Greek text and they all studied it and read it phonetically pronounced it phonetically and then translated from their hearts and their heads from the words and the phonetic sounds in their mouths and how it resonated in their bodies they attempted to translate the text it was accurate and Peter said only actors could do this it's a wonderful thing to share in the rehearsal room so that having laminated that into the rehearsal room gave you the confidence to say well only actors can jump across the door and catch somebody in midair as famously happened night after night after night and we were lucky to have the set or copy of the set a rough copy early on in rehearsal so it seems like it's a white box and it's been talked about as a white box but it was so much more than that because we could throw ourselves against it climb up those and they were dead like that no slope on them at all absolutely and go up and down and on the gallery and back down again and in those doors and out those doors which was also wonderful for the for the brightness of it and the alertness and obviously the when the comedy was required it was farcical as well to have a door in and out the door is a wonderful unit so just in the middle of a forest you have a door that's just wonderful perfect and then just the odd this extraordinary splashes of colour primary primary colours and we were slightly muted oh no i think the men were a bit brighter i was tie dye you had we were tie dye tie dye yes you have a coloured shirt blue blue blue ours was sort of creamy and rather faded was wonderful we were like we hadn't yet found our identity as women is how i am sorry really and uh and then well we did at the end because we actually when we were watching the play within a play we just oh we've gone these wonderful wonderful cloaks of velvet we were more in the realms of the king and queen then but uh we were dressed up as well you were dressed up absolutely smaller scale but we were dressed up with the candle with the candle it was to obviously end of rehearsal we performed was it in a school we didn't have the white box that's just a jimmy yeah the first audience was children yeah isn't it yeah and we improvised around the space the the the the the climbing apparatus on the wall the ropes the gallery that was absolutely thrilling then it was in a man's club in Birmingham that's right learning them yeah yeah yeah John Cain who played part written a wonderful account of that moment and how exciting it was and that you were all told to go off and talk to the children afterwards in the audience and he was talking to one young girl and said you know did you enjoy it yes i enjoyed it very much and have you been to the theatre before yes lots of times and oh why is that oh yes well my daddy works in the theatre and who's your daddy peter brooke it was literally reiner was it Simon was there as well i've never heard this story if you come across the the proper account John Cain of course rightly tells it far better than i know so wonderful moment but but that's about confronting an audience who don't know the story i mean that's the joy of playing to children but this was also a very adult show this was a show that was showed that this is a play about desire and sexual desire and love and erotics as well as having fun in a forest in a kind of more child friendly way and i wonder about the the dark side of the play but this production seems so willing to get up to its elders in and discover and how that affected particularly the lovers who go through such pain i mean you were talking earlier about that sense of hellen's pain i think is the four lovers towards the end of the play when we discovered entwined on the forest floor and then are invited to watch that exquisite performance of the mechanicals that was performed in a way that was historically funny and suddenly profoundly moving um be shrew my heart but i pity the man sestitania and and that's always been said rather cynically but in our context you believed her being and all the women in the audience at that moment being really moved by bottom's declaration of his love and his death and also we had occasion as lovers too to comment on it showed a maturity it showed a redemption so to earn that redemption you have to go from dark to light you will not earn that redemption otherwise so i think we all were so steeped in in Shakespeare stroke Peter's world that we embraced that darkness that knowing that that it would be redeemed and also that we would just just to say that we we were aided and abetted with some wonderful music of Richard Beasley and um and they were on i think it was only three people three musicians and they did it with us every night it was it wasn't like in fact it was one of the probably one of the only very few productions where um it's not just left to the actors apart from obviously stage management everybody else but the lighting designer goes the costume designer goes the director goes and in the end you have to do it but of course they return and bring it back to life but to have the musicians there every night giving us that that sense of because sometimes you felt a heaviness or weariness or or tiredness and then just but they were reacting to us it wasn't the same every night was it no that was extraordinary if we were a bit down it was sensitive they didn't push you know the music they would play what you were what you were expressing and then brought it up to a level that we thought was right um and that what we called what Ben was talking about the way what we called the waking up scene because we that was our maturity I suppose that we'd obviously it's never it's never talked about but they are which is why it isn't a children's play really but they obviously fucked and whatever happened in that in that forest they they lost their virginity or something happened where they found themselves and it's never quite spoken that Demetrius doesn't doesn't love Helena back and is made to love Helena with the drops in the eyes when we wake up there are no drops so why are we still together because something happens whether we just said I think it's very few lines isn't it that waking up it's a very small like we what happened is it and Peter even encouraged just to sing a sing a note if we wanted to yes just there was always a tendency for the lovers to kind of move into song I mean the line might be in the way that the great verse can it seems suddenly to turn so close to a song you started singing yes line kind of musicality lullabyd that was our our device that was that was accessible and tender for the audience when your feelings go beyond words but you have words will you sing them but it's a way of conveying to the audience I've got to the stage where I've I'm right up to the limit of being able to speak about this I'm going to have to do something else so I thought that device was lovely you sang and Mary sang I sang and Christopher sang too and in the second version I sang you did I got a beard song you remember what beard shall I do it in well I can do it in your straw color beard your purple ingrain beard but that was also that's a wonderful thing to suddenly burst in the song there were real actors you know they weren't really workmen they were actors workmen that's wonderful he sang and the sweet woolly bottom oh well that was a disaster we never quite got the note oh I love that's my favorite part and they don't spoil it for me none of the mechanicals could sing the note which started on so every night it started on a different note and it went nowhere so Lin Lewis was given a little tiny tuning thing which you blow and he gave the note but he put it in the wrong way around every night something went wrong with that song we were always in hysterical so we had to cry pretend to cry at the end and this this was the workers waiting for bottom and he's lost sixpence a day very important that sixpence a day and that was a lot of money yes peter I we talked about the journey that the lovers go through but but the journey that Oberon and Titania go through they reach a remarkable point late in the play of thou and I knew in amity but it's a very strange route to get there but Oberon has taken and I wonder about your thinking and working obviously with with Alan Howard and so I guess someone to find that journey that that makes Oberon decide that really what how am I going to win my wife back how am I going to change what's gone wrong in the relationship this this is this is a strange route to take I wouldn't recommend it to anybody well you've heard very eloquently from everyone about moments in rehearsal I think that it's important really to evoke what the actual essential movement of the rehearsals was and that started with something without which we could never have done this which was the possibly how many weeks did we rehearse 10 something unheard of but it was came about for absolute necessity you know when I was first asked if I would do this play it was one condition we have to have and already we'd in Stratford we'd been fighting for more time and I mean if you think in the original Shakespeare festival it was five days in which five plays were put on and then I think the Russian director Kamyshev Lefski doing Lear actually had five days to himself not five plays being put on in five days and gradually gradually this extended until it became one I think three weeks was the standard thing at Stratford three weeks rehearsal for new production four weeks and here it was just quite simple we couldn't do it without the time and what the time made possible was that from the very start each day we would work on the body physically for everyone we would read the play just sitting with concentration reading it listening to one another actual closeness to the play itself through sharing the sound and the reading then there was the actual work on the actual difficult acrobatic techniques and all those which had to be developed and studied and everyone had to do in still in 10 weeks which for us was a lot of time which in China and would be something you start at the age of five or six and it takes you 20 30 years to become a respectable master of these techniques so that for our group of actors it was a phenomenal challenge starting just from zero to master it but it was part of the daily process including sharing from us just discussion about what we're doing and from that process followed improvisation taking scenes with no idea of how they were to be so called staged but just very freely improvising it with people who had already been prepared themselves individually as a group in these directions all at the same time the body the words the sound the relations with one another of freedom and it was out of that but gradually I mean everything I don't you know it's very unfair to everyone when the director is praised for things that were discovered just like that in rehearsal I can't remember how the Hermia Thrank herself the door and being caught how that arose but it certainly wasn't something of my coming in and say why no what broke up no these things arose and that and that is slow process out of which that absolute necessity which goes on to this day but you can't go from that and then playing to an audience there has to be a bridge where there are people that you're sharing the story with and trying to make interest step by step in that which is starting with the children then starting with people like this work first club in Birmingham and then gradually gradually you do it until you have a preview and then you have the first night and our first night wasn't too good that I don't remember no I remember it but very clear you know and Peter Hall taking me on and John Barton saying no no no it's work and now starting work again and finding whole new thing I think the thing that for us was the most important then I remember it was only after that first preview that we saw what was lacking I think it was John Barton saying to me you know you're breaking this into something such a new direction but somehow this must be clear from the start and the first scene it's a first scene played differently but you're not taking us into something that makes us sit up and look and out of that came the idea of starting with the company at the back of the theatre all rushing with enormous piece of energy energy the music and that great energy of everyone rushing on to the set clandering and only with that could suddenly the focus go on to the first scene and that's in so to answer this is a long answer your question but it's in that climate I can't tell you how or when or what but very naturally Titania and Oberon having gone through all the different stages found their way into the climatic moment has begun and one of the decisions you had obviously made very early on because it's there in terms of the casting but pretty much unprecedented and now so common was to cast one actor playing both Theseus and Oberon and Hippolyta becoming Titania and a famous moment and at the end of the forest scene when they walk up the stage as Titania and Oberon and turn and walk back down as Theseus and Hippolyta and it wasn't about we need to go off and change costume and we need to do something else and we got to do this in secret as you know it was just a walk and a walk up and a walk back but you made that strong decision and I wonder about the thinking that says Theseus Oberon I mean it seems so natural to us now Hippolyta Titania but you uncovered it you remember the what led you to that decision and I think that's very simple but in any play but Shakespeare more often but particularly with a man's somnite dream for all of us starting point is that we have to trust something invisible called imagination and without an audience using something that isn't often called upon and which is vital which is that something called imagination one can't and in this case it is again back to the art of the storyteller even a further telling story to the kids a bedtime you're getting the attention all comes from a playing with that invisible thing called imagination and that's really what was in play here but more than ready and audience love that I think you'll find love you turning just like that from one person to another and without having to explain it and justify it by going at the wings and putting on a new one just ask someone else and everyone's with it I think pieces never pretended for a minute and therefore we didn't but it wasn't a play it wasn't a play but it was it was it was it required all the truth of life and in puck speech at the end when he said we have no cards up our sleeves there's no trick here you know we're spinning plates it's a stick in a plate and there's a white box and there's costumes and there's lines and we hope you enjoyed yourselves it sounds so simple but in how do you make that into a celebration I think the white box naturally came into being because in a white box what came before it was all these years of painted scenery of forests of forest and how a moon is a moon and now audience love being part of a game a play of imagination and then a white box nothing is imposed so of course but it's what the workers don't know because their decision is we've got to see if the moon is shining that night and we can open the window they have that literalness rather than an imagination that's right of course and open the windows even when it's shining look in the almanac look in the almanac yes if it's shining it's like to show our second clip which is the moment of of the love drug being applied to Titania because it's a perspex rod and it's a wonderful piece of speaking and a voice that many of us remember with such affection but talk about imagination but it is also one of the most threatening things I've ever seen disturbing troubling how how you get to that spot in which that perspex rod become something that applies a dangerous drug I know it's imagination but it's it takes a different world from anything we'd seen before that makes it possible say something about that Alan please I can still hear his voice fortunately I live not too far away from Strathfron Avon and automatically every time I walk down to a particular corner I hear I know a bank where the world time grows and it will never never feed my head he was a tower of strength a beautiful man a great company leader without question and an enormous encouragement to the rest of the cast it was it's no coincidence that a few years later in his career he was saying once more into the breach dear friends once more because that was in his DNA wasn't it he was a general absolute general but that that that was such a remarkable voice it's it is absolutely astonishing I think he he held us all together because if we doubted or if we went off the rails which I'm sure we must have done in our but held us together by example by does that mean no not by just by who he was or is they not lecturing but just just he never never criticised us never but he just what he was that leader and that Oberon that man and he just spoke that like that every night for two years I mean it's just incredible three we went on with yes 1973 we finished Australia and it was incredible when you talk about the tour taking a show like this right around the world we have in a in a wonderful book about the production we have the kind of packing list of what went into which container and so on to make this show and skipping countries you had to put your stuff in one a great big basket but you knew you wouldn't see it until you got to hungry because it that went somewhere else and it was quite quite but what about Alan on that tour was he was the solidness of it and never never showed it in any way a natural leader it was great the tour was extraordinary because you got the chance to play it to other people Japanese people to German people which were the best audiences as I remark in the world the Germans just phenomenal because they went forward and not like the English who sit back just so simple part of their life theatre in England it's just one of those ridiculous things and I remember on very opening night but then Alan Howard said look we have to control this audience because they're going mad and I said with Philip whatever I can't say Philip LeBlanc who said no we've got them they're on our side because we're doing the comedy and he was quite right so we didn't obey him that time Alan no it was an extraordinary tour and it was what was the strength was the play and the production you know I've taken tours around the world before they don't exist like that because the play was important and in a way we weren't nobody was important in that play that the play so you were all without knowing it pouring into that play and it survived and became brilliant and the the filming in Japan was extraordinary the quality of that it already got high definition which is a long time ago the quality of that filming was extraordinary and the debt and the simplicity again of it but we went everywhere Australia America everywhere it's great you should have come all of you Francis was talking earlier about the secret the secret play but also during rehearsal you should remember I'm sure you do that Peter said because it was not an easy room to leave I wanted to sleep in that rehearsal room I didn't want to leave it it was very hard to leave that extraordinary world that we were creating and I remember Peter recommending that when we leave the room and meet the other people in the company he said don't talk about what we're doing so that hugely empowered us because we all had a secret we were on a secret mission and I'm sure I was only part of the first part of the tour but I'm sure that secret was the volition that pushed it around the world we have secrets I think it also took on a kind of it was unifying but it was also very individualistic in one sense which was actually quite helpful is that I think we might have all felt separately that we had the secret we had the secret sure sure because I remember John Cain and we called him David Cain because he was there then he said what do you what do you think the secret is and he said do you think it's you so I said I think it could be Helena but then if you asked every actor there they could all say yeah it's over oh I'm sorry that you that you actually you have this incredible unity without necessarily having to be lovers or best friends you know the faith and trust you had in each other because of what we were doing didn't necessitate that we were husband and wife in it or whatever form of lovers that wasn't which I thought was very interesting because it showed the power of the trust of what we were doing really that we respected each other and it sounds a bit absolute and I didn't mean it like that but I mean we did respect it because of what we had gone through with Peter that it was we were on the right course and and if we stumbled you just had to look to the other actor and they would step forward which I thought was very I always wondered how you and the other cast who took it on after we we left and I think Jenny Stoller is here tonight and she played Helena after me and went on that tour and I can't imagine what it was like to take it into another world into another journey because in that way that this this thing of thinking this plays about oneself in a way I was jealous of that even though it was our decision not to carry on with it for various reasons but I'm everything you know no it's that belongs belongs to us Helena but it belonged to Helena there's a there's a thing that Peter said in rehearsal which I found one of the most fascinating things he's ever said well no I might give me a chance it's very good it's very important he said that whenever you get a play within a play between the two plays is a secret play and I thought that was an extraordinary piece of insight and we spent three years looking for that secret play you might never find it but the journey is the most important thing and do you remember that do you remember that the idea of the play within the play between the two plays there is a secret play