 Felly, ydych chi'n gweld, mae'n gweld fawr yma, mae'n cyrataeth gwaith o'r Exibition y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, Shakespeare a Tenax. Felly, rwy'n cael ei gwaith i chi'n gwybod i'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i'r gwaith. Mae'r gael yma yn y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth yn y 6 oed, mae'n gael yma'r Exibition y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, a mae'n gwrough i ym 400 oed o Shakespeare yn gwneud, wrth gwrs yn amdano, ac sydyn nhw'n gwybod i Shakespeare yn gy replicateid i chi, ac sy'n gwneud o'r cy mul oed ar amser trwy ddyliau deall. Felly, rwy'n gweithi Allwch chi'n eu bod ferwyr i chi'n gwneud y Exibition rydych chi wedi gweld. Mae ym 1 o gwaith yma, mae 1 o'r 10 a chyflwy summationyth yいつbeth ym Peter Brooks. The Revolutionary Circus inspired production from 1970 which moved the dream away from the illustrative world of fairies and forests into this symbolic white space where the cast evoked a very different kind of midsummer's night from the one that had gone before. Peter Brick, Francis Delator, Ben Kingsley and Peter Holland will be talking about that production tonight at 6.30pm, and there are still a few tickets left if anyone doesn't have a ticket for tonight's talk and would like to stay on. But of course Peter Brick's relationship with Shakespeare began much earlier than 1970 from the puppet version of Hamlet that he created as a child to the moment in 1946 when he became the youngest person to direct at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and was described by Barry Jackson who appointed him as the youngest earthquake I've known. Great compliment. Peter Brick's career is truly legendary and his productions of Shakespeare have included Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, his film of King Lear with Paul Scofield in 1971 and more recently than that productions such as La Tempet from 1990 and Hamlet starring Adrian Lester from 2001 both performed in Paris of course. So throughout his career Shakespeare has been integral to his experiments with theatrical form and his writing on the subject have been greatly influential from the 1968 classic The Empty Space to his writings specifically on Shakespeare in The Quality of Mercy and Evoking Shakespeare. There's really no way that I can possibly do justice to introducing Peter Brick so I just wanted to say to him a very great thank you for coming all this way from Paris tonight today to be with us here this afternoon. And I should just say that this event is also being supported by London International Festival of Theatre Lift and the lift by annual celebration of theatre from around the world is now underway and runs on until the start of July and there are productions all over London at the Barbican Saddlers Wales, the Royal Court and elsewhere. They do check out their program. So I will now hand over to Peter for this afternoon's lecture which Peter tells me the actual title of this lecture didn't arrive in time to make it to print but it is the skyscraper and I will leave Peter Brick to explain why. Thank you very much. Your sounds are better than words. Thank you. So now the words, words, words we need them. There is no way around it but they're never the end of something that was starting point and every word that we call Shakespeare is just a starting point. This is not a lecture because I have the horror of being lectured to and therefore of lecturing of other people. I'm trying to explore with you and at the end we'll share impressions what this word Shakespeare really contains and I'm only going to take dogmatically one firm stand because it's an absolute belief. The moment anyone says and I've got to be careful not to give the impression in anything I say I'll quote but when one says Shakespeare thought, Shakespeare said we are really taking the greatest mystery, the greatest enigma of all time in literature. This vastness called Shakespeare and we're trying to turn him into somebody who could be sitting here and could be telling us what we should think, feel about politics, about religion, about human beings on every level. And if we look more simply we can see that there is no trace anywhere of Shakespeare's own point of view except in a very special work of his which is the Sonnets where like in a diary he did express on certain precise themes related to love mainly his own personal experience. So in those way we do hear for a moment Shakespeare saying I thought, I felt, I lived but in all his plays and every actor, every director knows this and at their own cost and at our cost ignores it but each character is a fully developed living human being. There are no characters in the total range of Shakespeare's plays where the author thought this is the bad guy, this is the monstrous woman, here is a good person. No, each one of these persons at the moment when they speak expresses themselves with the full range of a human being and like all human beings the range is sometimes limited, sometimes these are poor human beings, sometimes they're very complicated and the complication is a richness and everybody's here to make us share, allow us to share. When we meet somebody in the street, if every one of us now just got up and looked at their neighbour and then talk for a moment, it's very small knowledge we could have of the other person as you say, good evening, where have you come from? But in the tiny space of time, the three hour traffic, the stage, it is possible for somebody who in everyday life it may take, and as the countrists would tell you, 10 years, 15 years to begin to know that person, here we can meet the different levels of the person in a very short time. Sometimes almost immediately that's what a soliloquy is about. In a soliloquy there is a concentration of what is lived through by the person over days and days of feeling and thought which leads to these words and so that leads us straight to what I call the skyscraper. I use this word in the way that all metaphors, all similes are a quick way of what otherwise could take a long, long and eventually boring time to explain, but a simple image at once contains a lot of levels of meaning and it is the same with every word that there is in this totality of works, these 35, 36 plays were considered in one volume, the works of Shakespeare in the same way this could immediately be sensed if we take this simple image of a skyscraper. What do we know about a skyscraper? Whatever it is, it has its root, it has even its basement, its cellars, sometimes flooded, sometimes right sinking into the earth, into the soil for better and for worse, and from that bit by bit a construction has been made which leads in the end. To what in all time, not only in Christianity, but in other religions has been the church, but the church as we know it is this building, we can say this is also the collected works of Shakespeare, but it has a steeple and the steeple is a finger pointing upwards to the sky. In a skyscraper we go to a great city of skyscrapers like New York and we're very touched, particularly if there's a setting sun by the beauty of what we see, but in the same way as with a church, a cathedral, our eyes naturally rise to this infinity but we so easily forget particularly in bad weather, in good weather it's sometimes too hot and sometimes we're too preoccupied just to pause as we walk along the street and remember that from our point of view this is turbulent, rich, dangerous place that we live in, this marketplace of our world is the whole world and then we stop, we look up, and we see that this is an anthill in this something named the universe and the reason that skyscraper means something is that it's a practical available image to me and at the same time related to the works of Shakespeare and that's what I hope that we can dwell on now in more and more detail in the complete works of Shakespeare, one can see that there are this infinite number of levels and that theme after theme, character after character, line after line and in the end word upon word you can either rush past or one can feel that within it there are these shifting levels of meaning, some of which open you up, just a few floors up, some pull you a few floors down and sometimes they lead you to that moment of astonishment, that silence when as we say so easily words fail in looking at our skyscraper, we go into a skyscraper, we go into a lift and it can take us very quickly floor to floor, floor to floor, floor to floor, right up to the top, still within that same building and then, and this goes for a single word, a single word, I was thinking today how easily one hears somebody talking about a part of their head and say oh it was divine, I know that you can go into a shop and buy a zen face cream and the whole of our culture is based on a few words that go beyond contain something more than their everyday meaning, even sacred is rapidly desacralised but they still retain that tiny intimation of something more so when we take the elevator we're still in the same building, we're still passing through these floors and floors until we get to the top floor and on the top floor of the skyscraper we can open a door and we can come out and that come out is where suddenly all the bricks and mortar, all the concrete, all the machinery, all that vanish all the concrete in the light and in the air and if one comes back to what we're talking about today, the works of Shakespeare, I can see that there are that moment and we can't make this a working method, these are moments of grace, marvellous moments when having made big efforts everyone directing a play, acting in a play, everyone studying a play, know that the efforts, the efforts it demands are like climbing the high building step after step and feeling as if it's a rehearsal process we've got there and then you realise that you're only on the eighth floor, it feels that you've got a long way, God we've got to start again, the process then when you start playing it's the same process, you go up and up and up and that comes a point when you've made the last effort you've got the top floor and there you can push that door open and suddenly there's no effort left, nothing, you're out in what it's all about and it's not just you're out in heaven, from there you have a view of the whole teeming world and from the top you look down and you see all the busy human beings, the busyness of the marketplace and you know that that is as real as any other part of human activity, this is as we are and even if you look carefully you may see the police charging in and bashing people on the head today more than ever but at the same time it doesn't lose for you, it doesn't take away from your sense there is simply in Shakespeare a simple line, there is a world elsewhere, come back to this redded word because it's so dry and theoretical, the esoteric and the profane these are dictionary words and at once one hears not from Shakespeare himself but through a character that he brought to life, someone saying hang up philosophy I might be a professional philosopher amongst you this afternoon, forgive me if I ran you with that but that's inseparable from those steps of words words words leading to definitions leading to analysis of plays footnotes all of which are useful steps that becomes a point with that's not eventually what it's all about and this brings us back to this redded word esoteric esoteric and profane for me we're examining them because they're ever present play by play line by line in all of Shakespeare there is this natural movement from the esoteric to the profane something that has opened and been deliberately brought down into the soil of everyday life but what does the esoteric really mean I think that today we can see that religions are such even what's called spirituality have got themselves a bad name they have quite rightly by abuses ever so many centuries got themselves a bad press and religion has so many massacres of in the name of religion the blood spills onto the word onto the different churches or faiths that this represents they are splashed with the blood that they have brought into existence simple fact but all through history there have been these little not secret but little quiet brotherhoods and sisterhoods of people sometimes finding the necessity to be together in monasteries or conference just to be able to give themselves in a pure way to what the call of their faith involves and there in monasteries and conference they are sustained day after day by rituals but at the same time they are paying the price of not being part of the rough and tumble of the everyday life then this need to be in a small number of people closely working together to share that findable something that goes right deeply to the heart there in every culture people have come together and as what they are trying to find is so precious it's not available in the marketplace unfortunately we know but today again like the word divine words that really belong to that esoteric tradition have been rapidly based on yoga tai chi these are all forms the great Japanese Chinese martial arts all of which have been developed in very special conditions and are now on the marketplace even there was a time when with our actors we were studying tai chi which was coming into Europe through one person for the very first time about 50 years ago and one learned that this was something based above all on silence breathing silence certain movements and what was so touching in it was that this was all in its very nature very light and effortlessly slow a year after we'd begun to study this a man came to see me who'd come from somewhere in the medallions and he said I've started a school I think that with no time for this Chinese method of tai chi but there's something in it and so I've started a school for quick tai chi and this is how the skyscraper the left gets to go right down to the basement but in the very same way with again it's shared by the current of rivaling religions we here all have to recognize although hardly anybody mentions it and today we are in a culture that created the inquisition I've just come from Spain they are very horrified what's going on but nobody mentioned to me civil in the inquisition as an expression at the time of pure Christian faith of the same time in Islam to protect its essential purity Sufism developed Sufism as something which behind that single word contained all sorts of things that could only be shared by those day after day and even hour after hour practicing developing the need for to understand more deeply certain indications that the Prophet had left and in Sufism there is something as striking dramatically as the inquisition there was a man called Halaj who after long long years deep deep inner search suddenly went up to that point in his inner skyscraper when he having climbed all those steps emerged and saw really what was all around him and said I am the truth there was no vanity in that he didn't mean but he was that he meant that he was opened up to a whole universe of something that we've never ever thank God been able to capture and explain the truth and having said that he was burnt at the stake just as we've done in Seville Halaj was burnt and say this now to come back to the middle ground because that's where we are really with Shakespeare there is that top there is that bottom but in the middle is that series of floors and it's a great number of floors but we are just in the middle there's still within the walls of the building there is still an intimation that there are more and more floors above there's a sense that we started from ground level and having started from ground level we've come here at the middle but we haven't forgotten the fact that when we come down we are literally coming down to earth and this to me is perhaps the most striking thing in the whole of Shakespeare's work all his plays Shakespeare brings us through his themes through the stories that he felt were exciting to develop through his characters we are raised to a point where for a moment I say recognize that we're together with an audience there are moments in a play when you feel that we're all touched at the same moment we've come in as a hundred so different heads different preoccupations it's quite right we've come off of the street and the street is that busy state of chaos of the world and now together in a short space of time we're working together with a little group of actors on a play on a theme on human relations we're brought to a moment and we're not in danger I think of being burnt for this for a moment but together we all sense this is a moment of truth something in human relation something between two young lovers something between Hamlet in front of his own questioning and predicament so many different ways we all feel at this moment what is being expressed is human and what human means is that it's like us all and what it means being like us all is that at this moment people that we don't know who they are sitting next to us no longer matters we are what's called an audience and an audience is a word in the singular we have become one body one body for a moment and that always expresses itself in a moment even a fleeting moment of silence you can feel that people are laughing chattering going along with it thinking of it as they go and then there's a moment when the whirling of the different heads which makes a noise that one can't hear but which is always there suddenly stops the only word that we know that really corresponds to that is we are touched and every actor every performer knows that they and the audience become one because everyone is touched by a moment of truth and at that moment everything stops and there is you see even for the shortest shortest moment in that moment of suspension a silence not an inert silence not a graveyard silence not a silence of old bones but a silence that is of life itself and Shakespeare brings us to us his plays his people bring us to this point but Shakespeare himself as the dramatist we know nothing of what he was after how he worked but we do know that at the moment when in writing the plays and every reason to believe that he wrote this large number of plays very fast a moment of writing had reached in himself through his characters that moment where something beyond what one could have expected is suddenly alive he feels that it would be pretentious phony alien to our life experience to remain there devotedly on our knees in a monastery now at that moment he feels the absolute need to make us all feel once again that we're all part of the human race all part of humanity by bringing us down to earth without hesitation with the crudest sexual jokes all through the plays one sees that natural in twingly there's not a play where the highest moments when we've hung up philosophy and we've gone beyond it to there and not linked to something of real crude taff and humour and whether it's mist was overdone over none by the last whether it's the boardy because the wind boardy at once brings you hear the word boardy and you're no longer the peak of a skyscraper and the boardy hand yes but the boardy hand is on what he could have just as easily or rather the character in the play could easily have said it's midday not at all he says and it's such a relief for everyone to have that natural laugh the boardy hand of the clock is on the prick of noon that natural natural humour brings everything down to the same level as characters like doll tear sheep mist was overdone they're all there to share in this task as all the jokers the jesters as the fool has to balance king lear king lear would never have the same resonance if along this extraordinary powerful multi multi dimensional figure of the skyscraper with so many flaws and levels king lear wasn't balanced by something as rich a tiny skyscraper with many levels but a child skyscraper down there which is the fool and the two interlinking make it possible for us to enter into a world beyond anything that we are capable of imagining Lear's own tremendous journey and yet we're there with a fool with his wink and his nudges and his jokes and the two levels once again come together and that is where this middle area of Shakespeare's work is so important as long as one sees and welcomes all that is of the marketplace all that is of crude low humour which in Victorian times was no doubt boldlerised or even completely let out of the play as not being worthy of our great national hero and today one sees that it's almost in danger of going the other extreme there is such a fear of rightly of anything too grand, too pretentious and above all of anything that you could remotely call esoteric or spiritual my god now particularly in England or very England if you look at this tradition is the most mystical of all traditions but it's carefully carefully concealed and always covered with humour almost always but right at the bottom you have this everyday level and that in Shakespeare the speed with which he goes from one to the other is sometimes breathtaking. I remember Ted Hughes telling me that he was very interested that the great pirate he was by finding the way in Shakespeare's play the word and has a very special place because for him Shakespeare and Shakespeare you hear a word that for a large bulk of the audience might seem a bit learned a bit something that the nobles and the intellectuals on the stage would not have said that's well said but for the rest of the audience of the common people, the thieves, the pickpockets, the whores and all the other people mixed together in the audience and so what was that word and how often in one sentence you have an and which links so that everyone can with the same meaning same surface meaning so everybody comes together without that feeling of but to go back to what I was saying about what I was beginning to think was that today which is for obvious natural cycles of human history having reached something which unfortunately was appropriated by one middle class in all the so-called developed countries all the countries that considered themselves educated and civilised because there was such an appropriation of the arts and so much value given to something being of good taste of being beautiful. I was brought up with this feeling but real the middle class sense that you go to a concert, you go to an exhibition because you're part of those who can appreciate beauty and then came in the middle of the 19th century this revolt against this a whole new movement which said something that would have been so obvious in Shakespeare's day that you're losing touch with the soil, with the basement and so from look back in anger and John Osborne onwards there was this rediscovery of the rough, of the value of earth and soil and roughness and actors who were told that they could never make a career at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre unless they learnt good kings and queens English and speak as gentlemen should speak the words of our great national dramatist and suddenly there were actors who said to hell with it, I'm going to play a prince with a north country accent, Albert Finney was one of the first to do this and these were major revolutionary steps and it brought the basement, the street level, the skyscraper back into the middle where the plays were being done but this very easily becomes an exaggeration and today one sees that making the plays of Shakespeare contemporary which is what they have to be plays only exist in the present, that's why one talks about presenting a play, a play is a presentation, it has no meaning at all if it's a recorded lecture that can't touch us today so a play is a re-renaissance, the plays written long ago suddenly are about us today, that's what matters and we've all had the experience of seeing plays of Shakespeare where we are no longer thinking in old fashioned terms of do these costumes, do these gestures, does that music, does that have the right period ring, no, just the quality of our experience at this moment and this is a two edged sword because either that can be the very stimulus to try to give a few floors higher up in the skyscraper without losing the sense that we are still rooted in the soil or it can be the opposite saying oh let's now go to lower floors and making something contemporary is this crude but so easy trap of bringing in television jokes, television gags, bringing in nods to current events in a crude way which for a moment can be marvelous but if the expense of it is to suddenly make us forget that there are higher floors then we are dragging the plays and the characters within them from the skyscraper where that quality shouldn't be always present rising and falling in every character in every situation in every line, in every word brought down by somebody, somebody discovering but if I say to be or not to be, yes that's the question, you see how easy it is to get a laugh it is a knife edge and it's very difficult for all of us directors, actors, writers always to keep in mind this endless balance that we have to find because it is there and we are talking about Shakespeare, the works of Shakespeare and every one of these works, these are all omnipresent at every time and I'd say in my own personal private working vocabulary the most useful word sharing some work with others all with myself is detail that whatever detail there is and by mean detail in the flow of time one says a line we say the line which contains the whole of skyscraper and like all Shakespeare these are lines of such simplicity that they can be understood all over the world which is to be or not to be we've used this so often with actors as a working exercise just to see that with those few words to be or not to be and sometimes that is the question there is no limit to the different ways that that can be said not if one is looking self-consciously of how can I change the music, remember the director is saying let's change the tune boy no just to feel that there is more detail that in the words to be, to be is a simple everyday word but one can feel something within that simple word to be there is a detail and that detail colours or not to be and the word question takes on new detail if the first line to be or not to be bring us to the point when it's clear that there is something in suspension something that can't be understood and then this coming down to the question or the exact opposite to be or not to be and then realising we've said something where we've rushed past the detail and that the question is on the contrary an opening to something more as I speak and it once brings to mind because in the siliquie one sees that every time it's spoken we're with an actor taking us on a completely new journey if the actor is really at that moment not playing ideas or thoughts but a living interrogation not of himself nor of Shakespeare but of that character, that unknown character called Hamlet and one can see how gradually gradually this is leading us to something which stops us in our tracks when he begins to say thinking too precisely on the event, thinking precisely at once links us to hang up philosophy, stop explaining, stop defining that very act of trying to understand just with one's rational powers with all that Descartes brought into European consciousness that can go just so far but there's a limit and at that point something which takes us through again the whole works of Shakespeare which is and lose the name of takes us right to a whole level esoteric meaning because it's there what is the relation between thought we have to act we're here on this earth to act we're not here just to sit shut away his hamlets and action it goes a very very long way that detail in Hamlet's overall exploration because it takes us right into so many great traditions it takes us in Hinduism to the heart of the Bhagavad Gita when before the great battle Arjuna sees that he is being asked to take part in a massacre and he sees in front of him half of his family his uncles his cousins and he is being asked to launch a war that he knows will massacre the people closest to him in his family and naturally as a human being he stops and this is just like Hamlet at that moment the God Krishna has to try to lead him step by step through so many complex meanders which directly relate to the same process in a different form in Hamlet the point where he realizes that he cannot abandon action and in the case of Hamlet we're right in the heart of an available unpretentious simple but challenging esoteric thinking here in Hamlet he is asked to revenge his father without soiling his mind here's a question that we can carry away with us today and if we come back to it we can never escape it for the rest of our lives how if only all our generals and leaders and people inciting rebellion, mutiny, fighting, struggle could ask themselves is it possible to go into what is understood to be a rightful revenge but father has asked him revenge he can't fail to do his duty to his father who has been unjustly murdered he can't fail in that and yet he is told by his loving father do it without soiling your mind see this is a question they say we can't get away from what does that contain we would long for our leaders occasionally to ask themselves that question but it's easy to be a politician because your mind is soiled already it's not for nothing that we come back to Hamlet it's not for nothing that we come back to Lear in Lear I've often quoted because to me it was so memorable how when Paul Schofield was the greatest of the many actors I've known that great in a very special way Paul Schofield never soiled his mind with theory and philosophy each time I started a discussion with him he'd stop me and said no no I have to play this and his way of acting apart was very simple he was in his forties he was playing King Lear and he was just like a person reaching the top of the skyscraper just opening the door and as he opened the door after preparing him the way he did everything fell away and he just was the character man in his forties one can see it in the film still of him he is he's not impersonating he's not in actors terms characterising an old man he hasn't studied how does an old man walk what does he do now he really becomes which is the aim of all that and the moment he becomes very special particular complex powerful but very old man he doesn't have to share it in the feeble way that many actors try to by showing that he's in his dotage no he just becomes a unique person King Lear who is in full possession of everything with one terror of going mad of losing his brain and at the same time the actor playing it is no longer the puppeteer controlling the acting no he is King Lear and so when it's something I've often quoted forgive me but for me it's the supreme detail of great acting every single performance he would say the simplest even simpler than to be or not to be after Cordelia's death never never never never never never I'm trying to be neutral not to try to imitate an actor because every single time in the hundreds of performances we did in so many different parts of the world different circumstances that the rhythm of those five was never the same because the whole of what he as a character had been experiencing at that very moment was what gave the detail to the vibration which went into the voice of those particular words and so suddenly you see in the most ordinary word there is never contains a skyscraper of levels and each one then it becomes like a skyline of New York because each one of those skyscrapers is a different one never there the value of seeing something that you know can't be imitated but it is for all of us a permanent call to try to work in that direction and there is no indication anywhere that Shakespeare was trying to teach us anything at all but he couldn't help all of his own experience colouring his understanding of a character who like Paul Skilfield's playing of a character suddenly the character becomes so that he's the opposite of dear friend and much of mad Sam Beckett who would spend a year dwelling on each phrase and trying to prove it deep humility saying yes but why? Why have I written that? What am I trying to say? Why is this man looking out of the window? Why isn't he sitting and with that marvellous reflection yet at the same time by thinking so precisely bought himself for a point when he could never go beyond it as only one person in history has done which is Shakespeare and there's only one thing I feel is unique about Shakespeare and that is that he's unique just that he has a name, he has this wonderful exhibition that the library has made where you see so many different aspects and you see his signature and you see his head and you see how other people have understood him but the unknown dominates it all because all that we do know is that he had an incredible capacity to look and to listen and that perhaps uniquely in all writing his capacity to be anywhere in the street above all in a pub but in the tavels where really so much of the life went on and in the theatre and talking with the actors and at home and in the country all of that second for second all the impressions were being absorbed and it's sufficient to recognise that while you and I can go and meet interesting people we can go on an adventure holiday have marvellous impressions but yes they're today they're selfies and they're photographs and we can show our friends but what we retain is a tiny number but if one sees this exceptional case but I've written about quite recently that in neurological cases we do come across this phenomenon of memory somebody who can pick up what was the old London phone book and in reading through retain names, addresses and phone numbers and this is something that again the mind boggles but it is possible for human being and if you have this one unique human being with a unique capacity to hear, watch, listen and retain there is no reason at all to say which is so snobbish and so repellent how could this peasant from the country know all that we people from the court, we people of learning, we people from the university have spent so much time learning that it was enough for Shakespeare to be in a tavern where a couple of soldiers back from some war laughing and drunk and exchanging memories and the next table he has somebody telling news of court and another table somebody talking about how hard it is to reconcile what you felt as a Catholic and what you're supposed to feel as a partisan he's absorbing all this but all this was not virgin territory because from the day he was born in the country he was absorbing and that love of nature the love of nature of the forest of the plants all of that which we see again in so many plays all the qualities that were there in the tempest all of those are things that very young he was there in nature before saying much later the theater is holding a mirror up to nature where you have the two natures the nature of the plants of the heavens that were there in some of the plays and at the same time it was the human nature the two come together but one can see but for all those who say poor country Yokel what did this peasant lower class man know about higher things there was a boy absorbing and today once they need to go to the country around Stratford and even today one can get the most wonderful impressions of the beauty of the earth of the plants of the flowers the trees the hills and it's quite obvious that somebody is sensitive this inborn poetic soul is receiving and none of those are lost that is the extraordinary thing about the human mind we have the impression that everything is forgotten but deep deep down and hypnotism can sometimes bring a bit up to the surface everything every impression second by second is retained somewhere and given again this strange unknown quality of what we call genius and the way that a musical genius this whole universe of sounds comes in without them even calling just because it's needed they're just because a character in Shakespeare is beginning to speak about something and suddenly you have a speech about order and you recognize that there is a whole of nature and the whole of human nature all live within an unknown potentially not in the chaotic chaotic way of everyday life but potentially there is always an order not recognized sometimes recognized sometimes distorted into a hierarchy out of which tyranny comes but coming back to Shakespeare nature and nature leads us straight to Prospero Prospero recognizing that within nature before you get into the world of the cities and the courts there is something that one can call and again it's a word that has so many levels like esoteric there is magic and that magic is what in the Tempest is violently used both by Prospero himself and eventually by the others who want to murder him is used ruthlessly for power and Prospero's wish for revenge has tainted his mind and he is hell bent literally hell bent on revenge until he the deepest deepest qualities emerge and makes him recognize what is beyond revenge and he breaks his wand he drowns his books he gives it all up to return to being a simple human being and at the very end of the play he prays for a prayer and it's an uncanny but this is again isn't Shakespeare it's Shakespeare through Prospero speaking of a prayer that pierces mercy itself the sense of a prayer that is not the way we think of a prayer but so sharp such clarity that is like a needle or a blade and that leads us to what may be and many people really believe is the last word Shakespeare wrote which is free and that free all these aspects of a human of outer nature inner nature that are clouding completely clouding us from a sense of what true natural order could be and that prayer for freedom the freedom of tolerance not the freedom but again a word that is a skyscraper of meanings freedom as far as we know that could be the last word that Shakespeare wrote that can resonate in us and that in a way brings together all the different levels of this unique something called the complete works of Shakespeare works that contain all the esoteric teaching in the world but not through a teacher preaching or teaching but there at every moment we discovered and rediscovered not just by sitting on home and reading it because there again one is betraying a real function of writing for performance but finding that we can rediscover this every time the words and the characters are brought to life for us and with us in performance and at that moment the structure with all its levels can for a moment begin to come into being and then of course we're back at the starting point I'm hearing myself say starting point I think it's a good place to end Just a silence Well Not completely Not completely Thank you so much Peter immense food for thought there and it will take weeks to digest There is time though I think for three or four questions if Peter's willing to answer a few if anyone would like to put a question we have got two mics going around and if you could wait for the mic if you have a question I do count the clock that tells the time I think instead of the beginning I certainly don't want this to be a lecture I have opened up what for me are so many questions and this is a moment not had for horror personal horror and this dreaded phrase are Q and A So there may be Q but there's certainly no A I'm not here I'm not here to be an A but we can share impressions where we open things up together you give your impressions you challenge your accuse the field is open Thank you so very very much you said that plays can only exist in the present tonight I'm going to go and stand at the globe theatre where they're going to try and recreate what it was like in Shakespeare's time is that pointless or possible I think that what is marvellous in the globe experiment is to see that the original globe the globe theatre really did was the most democratic of all forms and because it did contain a possibility for every level of society all to come together and so the plays and the people are all there The opposite of the Italian tradition of the beautiful beautiful opera houses in which gradually there were the young enthusiastic people with least money stuck away up there and the people with the most in the best seat so called closest the actors which is a terrible thing because the actor looking down sees fat sleeping bodies in front of And I mean we've tried very hard whenever one can to change that and have cheapest seats even cushions close to the actor so that there is that relation and so the globe and of course in the globe that all the time searching and that's in their own very active way to see how you can keep that life without it becoming a museum so I hope you'll have a good evening. I can't comment as I haven't said it. Thank you Peter. I'll ask for an impression rather than ask a question because it's a sort of unfair question. I'm interested in your thoughts your impressions about verse speaking today theatre being a living thing and we have to speak it for today What are your thoughts on actors approaching this language that's structured in verse? Well I don't want always to sound against scholars because it's very important but again there is this danger level where philosophy thinking too precisely can be a barrier And there was last century a big movement coming out of the universities of analyzing the structure of verse and actors of that school would learn how many to see how many beats there are in a line and where there was what's called an end stop and where there's a break and would learn this Like first level music students but all of that is only meaning as it is with music if you then assimilate it it's a good starting point it's ground floor and then you can free yourself of it but there have been lots and lots of schools and Stratford was no exception where actors were taught to speak and were taught into the rules and that is the opposite of what I was just trying to say with Scofield where of course the sense of these rhythms were there but they were never illustrated they were never the rules they were just a starting point perhaps he knew the rules of verse and when he was 18 but by that time he was 20 he was going beyond it and I think that is where one must be very very careful to say that the rules are good supports like I had to have the handrail and the steps to come up from a platform and now thank God I'm no longer clinging on to it it is that it's really a double edged sword the analysis of verse speaking I see this much more strongly because in English whatever the sentence is just illustrating whether to be or not to be there are a million variations on that music it is free jazz on top of the beat while in the French committee France's Alexandrine tradition it's never a word but a line or even three four lines with their rhymes considers as a whole and you have to really learn to respect that bring up the rhyme bring up the beat bring up that and that of course creates corsets around the actor a mutual acquaintance this is the very talks about feeling the beat in your bones as opposed to the rules yes you said it all feeling the beat in your bones hello it has been a very great person in the whole life of she gets to have other actors and it's been her birthday very recently I think she and I celebrated our birthdays together actually and strapped it just a couple of weeks ago it was very recent hello it's only a small detail in everything that you've said but the words that used rightful revenge concerning Hamlet's predicament whether or not he were able to do that without soiling his mind those words rightful revenge stick in me so I it's obviously just another enormous question but something in me couldn't let it go by thank you you're absolutely right rightful is the wrong word there is no what is rightful is to respect deeply the father's demand and then to find your way all the way through it and there it comes to what I quoted with Arjuna in the apt you can say I will abandon that action which is a pacifist way out I will assume that and nobody can say what is righteous one can only ask oneself is this righteous and what does that mean so you've raised an enormous question sorry I used so easily the word ask from here can you hear me I want to make an observation that while you were speaking you were facing that way to your left and the people on that side facing you responded with laughter we on this side were silent now that must be because they were relating to you and we were not and I wonder if that happens in the course of a live performance on stage in a play first of all let me apologise to all of you what is interesting in the play we are doing at the moment is the battlefield only recently I was saying to one of the actors watch out you are continually playing more to this side than to that and you must find a way quite naturally of talking as though don't look like in a film and this was an actress in fact who has done a lot of filming and in film the camera can move so you look straight into the eyes of the person even from a long long scene you don't have to turn your head because for the audience the camera will do it but I explained to her I said look in the theatre everyone we often do exercises on that but it is very difficult not to lose sight but if you are really sincerely involved in a person who happens to be there not to lose touch with the people there and here so thank you for reminding me thank you very much actually I am from Iran and yes Iran 1976 I came here because of two men both of them were English William Shakespeare and Tony Ben I came because of these two at that time Tony Ben was minister of what have they in common tell us you've really got an audience longing to hear so the only thing since I was there in Iran and I'm actually an actor I started to learn acting there in Iran I was always very very cross with people that were trying to say Shakespeare didn't write his books I think the best proof for this are people like you Peter Brook like Paulus Cofield like John Shapiro who wrote that beautiful book 1599 and Ben Kingsley and all the people like that proves that Shakespeare existed that I wanted to say this I'm glad to hear you mention James Shapiro because he is already a great great great experience and I spoke to him just very recently about the themes of this certificate of fame and he drew my attention to the fact that there is one very very great example of that and that is in the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle where the theme of death and resurrection very deeply esoteric theme and how this relates to something which curiously enough takes us straight to King Lear because in King Lear one can see this sense of the meaning of numbers and proportion King Lear with his enormous experience of ruling and of people saw right away that if you make a division into two that's what the word division means a division into two is bound to lead to conflict but if there is that third which was what he so hoped Cordelia could bring then future strife could be avoided now and it's the same thing in The Phoenix and the Turtle where in the end that unity is produced by the two being brought into one and so that does touch on the great great theme and that James Shapiro who I've got great affection and admiration raised that particular point in quoting Tomeva Phoenix Hi there I wanted to ask something of a motif throughout your talk has been what the man in the front said feeling it in your bones the masters of their craft feel it in their bones so Shakespeare, Schofield you seem to be suggesting that study is not something that can really take us to feeling it in our bones and I was just wondering what you feel the merits of study are if there are any at all and whether we can actually find that I suppose transcendent place that the masters of their craft do through study at all Well let's break this, it's a very important it's the last question I'm glad because it's a very deep question in the same way that we've been talking and I say on images just an image and the skyscraper once we're finished with it we can throw it out of the window but what we've been talking about the skyscraper makes us recognise these infinite number of intertwining levels and that you can't jump from one level to the other or fall out of the window and come in you have to rise, rise and sink and there's always a lot of effort now the same image we can turn on that side and say the human being now exactly the same structure of levels there is the skin and that's the shape that we all recognise look at other person and look at ourselves and afraid to laugh at ourselves and that's the outer level which can be very beautiful can be very convincing within it there is before you get actually in the flesh the blood cells and the circulation there are many many levels that every dermatologist can recognise and then behind that there is a whole irrigation of the body for the blood and then you come to the bones and even a bone contains different qualities within it so that if one sees that in that same way every work of study it's just like a medical student or a surgeon you can't start by taking off your knife and go making a cut you have to have studied and learnt and recognised how vulnerable this human being is and how easily your knife can slip but that doesn't take away from what you're asking on the contrary the deep value of every form of study and exploration from the outside more deeply to the inside as long as one never for a moment believes that the levels have finished and now one's got to the core unlike a fruit you can get to the core of a fruit to get to a core of a human being there's no end Thank you very much