 Ie, in, I suppose in 2002? In 2000. Den Actually changed the whole basis of the play. And the play is about a sort of meeting between Neils Paul, great case physicist, and Jenna Heismberg, great journalist. They were old friends, and they try very close friends, and they've done a lot of the basic Ie Fan agor, roedd eich mheriau, roedd wedi bod yn gyfodol a roeddaeth eich amser. Ie, iddydd yn llwyth â hyn iawn – ac mae'n meddwl. Mae hyn rydyn tu talks i ym workloads sydd cyfraffydd, mae'n meddyliadau y mheriau yn gallu ei fionedd. Fe y gallwn y placebydd y gallwn oes o'r llwydd. Mae'n feddwl am rannu. Mae'n meddwl am yr hyn o gogherd. Mae'r meddwl a'r meddl yn gallu'n meddwl am yr hyn oherwydd i'n meddwl yn rhanol. Mae'n meddwl yn allan oherwydd i chi'n meddwl i chi. byddw i, ynghylch yn gwneud yma roedd oeddwn i'n dweud ymlaen. Well, mae'n rhaid i'w pethau o gyfwysig o gyfrifiadau, wrth gwrs, o'r cyfrifiadau yn y llwyddiad, o'r llwyddiad, o'r cyfrifiadau, o'r cyfrifiadau, o'r cyfrifiadau, ond mae'n bach wedi'r rhaid i'r hyn o'r rhaid o'r hyn yn fwygau, o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn, was as close to it as I could possibly make it. However, when we had this conflict here in 2000, it changed the historical record because at it, General William, the distinguished philosopher of science and his professor of history of science for years, said that 14 years after, 16 years after reading, when Niels Bohr read Heisenberg's account of what happened at the meeting, he was so angry that he had written a letter for Heisenberg, which he had never published and which was found among Bohr's papers when he died in 1962. Houghton said he had been consulted by the Bohr family about what to do with this letter. And Houghton's reaction seemed to be very curious, but he suggested that they should put it in the Bohr archive and keep it there. He bungered it for 50 years, until 50 years after it was that. Which seems to be a rather odd reaction for a historian. A historian has an interesting view of the document. He said, let's publish it in one photograph. That's what he said. And Houghton said, if we had seen that letter, it would completely change our understanding of the meeting while it sent it from the camera in the play. Well, of course, even though it was in Bargo, and the Bargo wouldn't have ended until 2012, as soon as it sent it to everyone, it got curious about what was in the letter. They wouldn't know. And very sensibly, the Bohr family released it early. And indeed it does slightly change the history of the meeting. Only very slightly. The most astonishing revelation is that the Bohr family is that Heisenberg did manage to let him know that there was a programme in Germany to produce a tonic weapon that he, Heisenberg, was running it. And that he now thought it was possible to make. I don't think it was. Well, this seems to be absolutely astonishing for Heisenberg to go and talk to an enemy alien in the middle of a war, in the middle of a fight, the secret meeting between the two wars, half Jewish. And it's also a passion of anti-Nazi. And it was notorious in the German eyes for having given a lot of assistance to Jewish resistances to have to leave Germany. That Heisenberg would go and tell him this in the middle of a war. It does seem to be extraordinary. Do you think of the commons that Oppenheimer managed to arrange to leave Heisenberg, for example, in, say, neutral Switzerland at the time, and then told him, oh, by the way, we're trying to build a tonic bomb. I mean, it just, it may go as the imagination. And I think it goes somewhere to supporting Heisenberg in the Council meeting, that what he was trying to say during the war. Anyway, after the war, after the commons, then the Heisenberg family realised that they have a letter. This letter was a Council meeting, was written 14, 614, 15 years later, and it had all the problems of trying to remember what had happened a long time ago. Heisenberg had written the letter. During the week he was in Copenhagen to his wife. He was working in Berlin on time, and she was living in Leipzig. She wrote the letter to her while he was in Copenhagen, talking back to Germany, and posted it to her. And it's absolutely fascinating, because one of the things that was disputed about the meeting was a lot of people said that war was so upset at the idea of receiving Heisenberg, that you wouldn't see him at his house in Palsberg. You'd only see him at the institute in the centre of Heisenberg. Well, let me make it clear that Heisenberg went to the Borshaus on the evening he arrived from Berlin and spent the evening there, so that's one thing, et cetera. But the surprise is that he went back for a second meeting on the Wednesday. Well, the intern, although he doesn't mention the actual conversation, probably, because he thought the letter might be open for him to start very new, or something like that, the internal evidence suggests very strongly that the conversation must have occurred at some point in the second meeting on Wednesday. Well, the only thing that everyone's agreed about that meeting was that they'd wrecked their friendship, they'd been very close friends, and they tried to put their friendship together to get after the war, but it would only rather make success. So that's the only thing he thought he knew about. Well, the next surprise on the letter is that Heisenberg went back to the Borshaus on Friday, two days later, for a third meeting, and he says, in many ways, it was a particularly nice meeting. He was more readily allowed to meet, and I played in the website in Major Piano Staff. So the one thing we thought we knew about that meeting turns out, thanks to the symposium organized by Brian Schwartz here in this building, not to me in the case. Of course it raises the question why if the friendship had survived until the Friday divided when they looked back on it, it seemed that their friendship had kind of ended as a result of those meetings. And I suppose the thing is that history is what we remember. It's not what actually occurs. A great model of things occurs all the time, but history is the version we have in our heads that we write down later. And the significance of what Heisenberg has said may not have been immediately apparent to all. It was probably later, when both men looked back on it, and the circumstances of the German occupation in Copenhagen were worse, and the revelation of Nazi crimes made the Nazi regime seem even worse at the end of the war. Maybe when they looked back on that, they both began to feel a little more uneasy about how they conducted them. That's just my first thought. So anyway, that meeting did change the record for better or for worse. That is a great thing. The correlation to Brian and also the greatness that I could feel, it also does have an impact actually to try to bridge academia and the professional world, the practical world in this, and this is a great example, Michael. Let's maybe talk about theatre. You started as a journalist. Why do you write plays? I mean, it starts, but why? There's a famous open line about why. There are so many things one could do in life, and you could have done. Why do you write what you think it can do? What can it do? I write because it's really the only thing I can do, because you either do what you think you can do, or what you can do, or you can suppress it and find something else, and it's likely to turn out worse. But I was not an actual theatre writer at all. I began as a journalist, as you said, and I wrote up a human problem or something like that, and then I started writing novels. And I didn't write plays. I didn't write plays because I despised the theatre. I had nothing but scorn and distaste from the theatre. And I'd written a number of humorous pieces that I'd written for people who were mocking the theatre. Of course, it was very embarrassing, but we just expected actors to forget their lines and brought their props, and the whole thing was completely artificial anyway. Well, why did I take that attitude? Well, I was a student, I wrote a student review, and it was a failure, a humorous review, and I never knew laughter. And I think I turned against the theatre like a fox, and the play was in some graves. And it went on until my late 30s, until I was practically back into the theatre. I started back and forth. It was very late. I came in with a young brother from there. In their 30s he said they'd rather been ruined by success, or failure, and brought themselves to death, or whatever. It was very late. Were you already had to make it by that time? Talk about making it. Do you think it's a chance of getting lots of water? Yes. The quality of that. There are many... Here they said that. My question is, let's give music of the theatre of the house. We talked about the theatre, there are different chambers and rooms. There's ballet, there's dance, there's poetry, there's simple storytelling, there is experimental theatre performance or people who are at a modern place, at a minimalistic place. If he was worse, the rain of the world, there's a variety of epic theatre. You have a special corner, and they're in the way of a philosophy of narration behind it. People believe that audience will follow that. The play Copenhagen, the incredible thing was that this would work. I'm sure you never expected it, I think also. Any normal producer in their mind on Broadway would not have opened it if it hadn't been successful. Two and a half hours of high intense dialogue and most complex matters of science, human behaviour, and then of the history. You believe in a narrative structure. How do you think, why do you think this works? I think theatre can obviously be a wide number of different things. There are all kinds of possibilities, as Mick and Siad said, about language. It's a complicated game. Different games you can play with, language different games you can play with theatre. But I think narrative, telling a story, is one of the fundamental ones. It seems to me that human beings have told stories from the very earliest times and they're likely to go on telling stories until they were finally one way or another, and then the story. And I think it's because stories try to make sense of something that doesn't, since doesn't exist in the world, the world up there is a very complicated match for different things that we take in, and we try to make sense of it by imposing some kind of picture on it. A picture that we derived from our own feelings from what we've read. And it's very natural to try and understand the narrative line of seeing how one thing leads to another thing, which is often very far from a hand in life. So I think it's very reasonable to have plays, as well as novels, to have some kind of narrative. Well, if you look at break plays, well, often everybody says it's kind of interesting in a way, or you look at comedies that, of course, there's a narrative, but your narrative structure is so complex. It demands so much as I'm witnessing trust from the audience. Do you think, what do you see happen in the brain of the audience when you go out and change the world or when you just became aware? What is the headland, this complex structure you create, this DNA of your play and what do you want the audience to think? What's your idea? I don't really want the audience to think anything except hopefully that they enjoy the evening. It's entertaining, don't it? No, I'm just telling the story. The story is to get a story and you follow the story through. Maybe that appeals to other people, maybe it catches their imagination, but maybe it doesn't, and I've written a lot of very unsuccessful things called People's Fantasy, but you can't really judge it in advance. And even the most cynical and commercial producers who are very experienced in making money after judging people's taste are not very good at judging what public taste is going to be, well, is going to appeal to people. This is only during the theatres to anyone who puts something on the audience. You never know how the audience is going to react until you've actually tried it on. I think it's been a surprise. Some very nice surprises that the audience is going to have to be more receptive as with Herbert Hagan when he wrote us all. You get some very nasty surprises. My worst video is a play called Look and Look and everyone thought it was very funny. The producer was very funny. He came to see the final one through in the rehearsal room and I said after his audio notes and he's very picky and he said no notes. I said, well, come on, give me the notes. He said no notes, it's wonderful. It's very funny. We moved into Sfieffa, started very late in front of a live audience and we knew it was absolutely dead. We also knew that since we had a performance previously that I would re-write it every day to pass on a new version of it. If you do surgery on a corpse when it was surgery new you go on with the corpse and so we did with this and Stephen Fryd who was playing one of the plays and the thing the funeral wait for the play and the run ended said, well it may have been a turkey but at least it was a walled turkey. But really people never never know nobody knows it would be one person when you know the original gates that would be my guest but it's truly dead. It's nobody. I just want to make a personal observation. I like that one line in your play I think it's Copenhagen now they are all dead and gone now no one can be hurt now no one can be betrayed. So of course it's about the main characters but in a way also I think it is a statement on the very special sound I think in your plays have I think the characters are attached or ghost like it's not a corpse or anything but I know what you mean Mostly the young couple is the same between the living and the dead what you portray very often dead people you resurrect them and someone who's alive plays them but they don't really exist so what's happening there it's real but it's not real so it's a sphere Japanese theatre is noisy but why I find it so remarkable also reading the plays again and the sound of the dying is somehow attached almost like God's talking the hyzerwag on board said all everything has happened nobody tries to force this action to do something so you hear almost like angelic voices looking back looking down I think it is quite remarkable and it would even but that's my question if you look at the noises of how they talk and how they talk when in Copenhagen they have some kind of distance to what is happening is that real or is that is that something you make sense is that something cheaper you think about and so on but like that I think it's certainly true in Copenhagen but the thought in the noises of those retro actors were right up against it they were dealing with collapsing situations and as best they could from one moment to the next I can think there is a kind of dialogue in play but it's a dialogue between the actors and the characters and the audience the audience is a very critical part of the theatre actors just performing lines in an empty role within the theatre actors trying to communicate with other people and succeeding or failing or not succeeding which is between the theatre but it's too early to be intervening it is but there is no exception in Copenhagen I mean Margarita is trying to persuade Heisenberg to to face up to something to confess something and Heisenberg is trying to understand himself what he was doing I don't mean it in the sense that the the audience is speaking that way it makes it so successful in the space between listening to the words and the reflections and without that you are selling something where you have to convince that you create an atmosphere of understanding theatre started out as someone mentioned there were the gods first and it was about the emperors and kings and slowly we went to the merchants and they were the servants and it was about the teenagers and some say now it's about children but they don't think about it they don't think about your characters in the way you and create them we present kind of a voice in the theatre that is unique I think also the idea that I can notice it all the view behind a curtain to see what's behind what's actually what's moving people so the time, the betrayals you wrote a book on philosophy also was that before you wrote a craze? Well I wrote one short book early in my career book of instructions one of the worst titles I've ever had as I realised when I talked to my agent, my own agent in the course of one conversation I referred to it once as conceptions and once as contraction and then I wrote another one more recently a full book called The Human Truck which is a sort of old fashioned philosophy that covers the entire world and obviously the origins of drama I had to give a lecture a few years ago at Oxford on the origins of drama and I did a lot of research and met all the staff of our pipe again probably in classical Greece as a religious part of a religious ceremony in bottom of Dionysius or possibly as I asked me earlier in Egypt and while I was thinking about all this I was sitting at the dining table and I realised I was looking at the origins of theatre on the other side of the table and it was much older than that but on the other side of the table was my then I think six-year-old granddaughter who was playing with her at the door and she was a great king of soft toys and dolls and she was picking them up one by one confronting them and confronting each other putting words into their mouth and I remember the drama I met kids of me doing that for much longer than actors of me putting on plays in the fashion prescribed by the historians and I think this goes right because this play is messing around it's presenting some kind of version of the world that even if it's based on history is not part of reality it's something which has its own logic in general which hopefully reflects something about the world that catches people's imagination that is messing around and I think it's a lot to be said even in soft I'm sure you've read the story there's a new one that I didn't even have the use for it's amazing stuff which I think is one molecule thick of me here he's a better conductor than copper and he's stronger than steel that's an astonishing stuff it's very, very thin and that was discovered by two serious soft toys that were running a serious program of work trying to do a definite program of work but at the end of the working day they missed a lot and they filled a lot with things and the cause of messing around with things they discovered graphics and I think a lot of the stuff even in songs even in serious songs they've done a lot of people messing around if I had to say what is there in a few words is messing around a question about that is also fantastic to play democracy which is a big theme I mean also the credit of the series of public lectures on the idea of the significance of democracy and what are we losing and why we have to go back or has to renew itself but it was a really remarkable transfer of the old scandal even though I knew a lot I could really see this as a remarkable play or betrayal trust, memory what do you think people talking to each other so I saw a reference that actually Don Carlos I'm sure was an inspiration so as a classicist I was an educator of theatre so what he said was that a model or do you meet the classics being a model but certainly Schiller is one of the world's greatest panellists and one I particularly admire and I particularly admire Don Carlos I can't remember thinking of it as a model but if Schiller did demonstrate once again as Shakespeare did that political situations can make drama the idea is of enlightenment you know the one who strives for ideas that ultimately is something so as I came to this story I always love Schiller and that's supposed to be good to really try to get into his work and he never allowed anybody when he came over he told the show that it's ok he told me I can come in stormed out green in my face and then she also knew he was supposed to be there it stinks so terribly standing up standing up dictating classic way it stank there and then she said don't you know what do you mean and he had rotten apples so he would had forced himself to write against a smell that is revolting and so in the sense everybody living theatre the capitalist system the fascist what is your what do you write about or do you do you energetically observe what is your why do you have the wrong apple story to say and just in the sense of it I already was like anybody else and I try to write this off I began my career as a reporter working in the reporter's room of the newspaper and if you work in the reporter's room you can really work anywhere because a lot of noise is going on tell us what's going on tell us what's happening and if you work in the newspaper it doesn't matter to you much when you happen to be is there something that you you know a forum brechtgater are we starting with so what is the threat but also what are you writing is there something you writing against or do you observe and you say these are my observations as my theatre the way of thinking these are my thoughts on life to understand better and give meaning to it I think it's a bit different now about what's going on in my own head as Copeland Hayden suggests but so far as I can tell ideas somehow drop into my head of all of my work and take root and gradually you begin to think more and more about this idea until it becomes slightly obsessive and you can't get it out of your head you keep thinking more and more ramification but many ideas come on in the first place I don't think this is something that particularly applies to people who are doing noble things like writing plays or books or whatever everyone has this system how do you decide some idea takes root in your head some scenes on magazine some way out of the box some reason that idea takes root rather than our ideas when you follow it through and the act of writing is that what's your method how long do you research and you've mentioned it type writing or hit writing or computer do you have hours a day how does that playwrights data in the life of a micro friend well I use a work process that absolutely suits me fine so since I can touch type you seem to be thinking straight on to the screen but when we were in Frank's office beforehand there was an ancient adult typewriter and I recall that I wrote most of it before the days the work process was on an old adult typewriter very heavy and solid and writing most of it was a quick deal rewriting because every time you change something in the backstage changes what's going on from birthday and every time you change something in that role it changes what happens in that three so it was like trying to hold it and since you couldn't rewrite a typewriter it meant you had to keep clipping or gluing new bits of text on to their text and it was pretty cool it's so right when you're both at home and you're writing in the mornings or you've got a lot of things you read for how does it take you to write a play well that was nice and straight but I mean it takes me a lot of time so it's not quite right but I started after a practice in the morning and worked at lunch and now I have a nap after lunch so I'm working the afternoon but at the moment I'm not actually writing very much but I don't have any no idea how it has happened before when I had it someone did a portrait of me in London and they did a portrait and they did a sycamore seed flaking down in the air above my head which was quite a good representation it is like a sycamore seed that is a little and so we opened up who are your interests who are you up to I mean we mentioned to you about who was formative in your theatre or singing what are your reference when you started out but also down what do you think is your significance in your theatre very difficult to know what was your sense of taste and style but obviously in my case I couldn't help but be influenced by Jack Hop because I translated all my last four plays and adapted them for us from Russia from Russia for the only reason I knew it there are a lot of better writers than I know but as far as I know I'm the only person in England who both can read the original and work in writing plays and writing plays is a lot of different from writing dialogue from plays while writing different from writing dialogue and of course you can't help but if you can't say something you have to you don't just sit there and sort of sing you have to really understand the structure of it and I say that's the amazing discovery amazing for me I'm not sure if you are studying translating those eight Jack Hop plays but they are all the plot they don't just say it's all the plot it's such a good writer people just happen to say this and happen to say that but let me look at the every line in the driving form of the story and this was a big discovery for me trying to respect that but I was also influenced by a pretty friend of mine who was a friend of mine and he was being very successful at the time with our wonderful play called Death and Jerry and I was very struck by the plays and by some of the things he said about the man he received who said you are here so there in the room he's ridiculous but pretend that you exist that you should take into consideration that they action on stage but when you're old enough to do that but I sometimes try to test them so he was good and what happened for your enormous work in the theatre and for writing the art it's quite as what you think is a significantly younger play by this listening now and what is really fundamental what do you think to audience and what should people keep in mind when they work for the theatre well there are just so many different ways that you can do a play there are so many different effects of play that you have and so many different aids that the writers can have it's a very it's a very broad church it's a very useful and I wouldn't make anything different to anyone about what they should be doing but there's what we've been talking about since there's one saying that I think this is wonderful the German play by Friedrich Hebott said in a good play everyone is right well you can immediately think of play as well this is not true plainly not the case that Diago is right plainly not the case that Claudius is right in Hammond and so forth it's not a bad and general principle that every character should be more of a writer but should be free to make the case for himself free to try to make you understand why he or she does what they do and sometimes it says that all writers should have but not I don't understand this is a really great advice I think we have a very good theatre audience theatre makers here so I don't want to occupy too much of your time again thank you so much for sharing being here with Claire last night at a great evening here she's a biographer after many works on Dickens and others and she wrote a lot of call-outs so we were lucky to catch to catch Michael and here and with that so you're going to be very impressed yes I think so if you ever wanted to ask something to Michael Ryan this is a really good moment to say maybe one question just to say you're not too worth reading but answer them right away but really so we go here one, two and it was another one three, four and I have just so many so to be more democratic so we also hear the questions you're one of a small group of people that writes wonderful plays and wonderful programs I can think well that all the people I can think of are English there are no Americans who can do that can you make them then I think it's been surprising that more people don't do that because they are very different forms and they're working great in different ways and it's quite interesting to do both because they reflect back on each other if you might have made the influence the way you write them the influence the way you write plays of course I'm very aware that the channel was not only one of the greatest theatre writers that there would be but it was a great story by me it was wonderful it's been getting better it's been getting better it's been getting better but other people have done better it's not something I want to do but in fact it's a lot better there's a young master of radicals who attended the cinema who was a lobbyist but who's now starting to write new plays show of family show of family maybe introducing your something else show of when you were was it on the show of family was it on the show of family one two okay no no no when you're writing a play like the movie or the movie based on a historical event is there something that I would do in that fabric there is something as the general DNA play is there something that you feel about in orinture work from us yeah I only come to writing a play based on real history late in life a character and I sometimes wonder if I started doing it because I felt guilty that it was really easy to make stories out of and I saw how hard my life was writing and I saw how my life seems to be working and he said can you say again under events okay how's that yeah so I I started writing a play based on real events and it it does take a lot of research and hard work and the question of writing why write fiction about real events why not write history and biography there's a lot of things that can never get into historical records what goes on inside people's heads for instance what people feel you can suggest what those things might be and I think you've got to make clear where you've used historical records and where you've invented something but it seems to me pretty fair to speculate about what I was going to be reading because it was up to and it can be a supplement to the real record the historical record which is a record of external things the record of what people said and what people did and what people wrote down so that's why I do it when it was question 3 was we would I have a question? yeah hi I loved both Copenhagen and Neuzerhof and I wondered what was the kernel of the obsessive idea for both that got you started what was the and what did they have in common? okay what was the jacob point for Neuzerhof and Copenhagen Neuzerhof on the first show when I finally got around to writing for the theatre it was called the two of us it was four or five or four plays I forgot them all they were done by two actors and one of them was a farce really kind of a farce done by only two characters because it's all farce about character being found in compromising so they paid five characters between them and one night I watched it backstage and watched as the actor ran insanely from one door to another doing quick changes as they went and I thought this is funny on what's going on on the front and I would like to write a farce scene from behind it was a very easy thought to have between that and it took me many years and many different ways of coming at it but that was the first point Copenhagen was because I read a book called Hasn't Go to War by the American Bartheon's Parrots and I read it for the first time about this meeting in Copenhagen in 1941 well although I didn't know nothing at all about science I did study philosophy and if you study philosophy you can't help to come across what was going on about quantum mechanics and the development of quantum mechanics because it's got so many weird philosophical implications which get not less weird but weirder weirder as people discover more so I knew something about what Lord Eisenberg would be doing in the 1920s and immediately the idea came to me that the story of their meeting the difficulty of knowing what they were doing why they were doing it and the fact that something suggested a kind of parallel uncertainty with the uncertainty that Eisenberg would have introduced into physics for completely different reasons but not remotely the same reason but just as Eisenberg demonstrated it's theoretically impossible to know everything about behaviour of a particle I think it's theoretically impossible ever to know everything about people's thoughts and feelings and we're confused we're endlessly spend our lives producing why people people they do we'll never actually be known and I didn't think that the development of neurology is going to finally show the world of problems so that was the shape of what's for those two places seemed like it was working just I don't give you any no it's going to be recorded there is a saying in Hebrew lechol na binebw a chad every prophet has one prophecy which means Shakespeare is Shakespeare is Shakespeare what is your single prophecy as you reported your single prophecy your single prophecy is not the seal of the queen they would use scams on most of my plays it's about how we make sense of what's in front of our eyes how we make sense of the world this seems to be run into the running themes of philosophy and it's my thesis in the human touch which is somewhat of the plays that there is a paradox in our relation of the universe that we all know that the human being is totally irrelevant to the universe there is a tiny tiny tiny anomaly which has come in very very late in the history of the universe called Vanishing model who occupied a tiny tiny insignificant part in the world if you think about it everything depends on the existence of the human beings if no human beings to say the universe is large if no human beings to say that we are only a small fringe event in the great event then there is nothing that can be said about the universe there are no measurements that can be made measurements don't exist independently of human beings they are made by a human being comparing one thing with another those comparisons are not objective parts of the universe so that which is plenty of communication in the first position it seems to me just as curious the first one and as Bohr said Bohr loved paradox he thought paradox was the source of all this but it's I think it's the root of all philosophy that's why philosophers are not on philosophy because there is no way of solving this problem so if I think what can I say about this the background of it for the world at the risk of this being fake news because I read it on the internet and it is a paradox that your father was both deaf and if that were true how did he do that job and how did it affect you to become a writer obviously I read by Bohr I wrote a memoir on my father my father was a salesman and I tried to work a rep for a firm that made a building for Jerry he also became very deaf as I read on he was an inherited family deafness and I resolved when I read the book I became more and more struck by his character in carrying on he couldn't really hear what people were saying and one of the ways he dealt with it in which he had an elaborate hearing aids which in Thursdays he wrote a great network of wires and batteries in this pocket and microphones here and transmitters in that pocket too and the other way he dealt with it was making jokes because if you're making jokes the other person either laughs or doesn't laugh you don't have to hear what they're talking about so he kept the conversation initially through a human and I felt maybe that had some perfect old meaning he also used to write sketches that he my sister and I performed at Christmas in which we had all the funny vibes maybe that had a favor maybe I found it interesting that your father's company was called Turner Asbestos and you said you'd like to go to the museum to look at Turner as an artist so thank you, I just want to say thanks for coming I'd like to also add better factors to play as well so so how do you know when your play is fully done do you come to a point where you know that this is the stopping point is there always a constant exploration in that there comes a point where people just stop how do I know when the play is correctly well it's a very practical question because you never do know there comes to be a point when you think you've done everything you can do on it and then when the actors start to perform it you realise it needs more work and some writers, Tom Stoppard, I've come to mind do a lot of good writing in the rehearsal period I don't do very much I hope that there won't be any that they insist that the actors simply play the lines that he has written but the Tom likes to work with the actor and change the text but really with any luck you get a revival play in years to come you've seen it many times in front of the audience and you can't help most of that with the audience on board other bits of the audience can't understand and you think of better ways of doing it so whenever I get a revival play I involve each to work on it but particularly to trim it and cut it and cut it and I've just been having a great debate with the Michael Blakemore who did the original production original four productions of COVID-19 and has done the new one at the age of 19 in England and I've marked great swathes of it that I wanted to cut and he said, no, we can't it's right as it is and we have this great debate and since there's a much more powerful character than anybody, it's that we want and we haven't got anything but I so wish we had to I don't think that really I haven't written any long things for some time but I write shorter and shorter sketches and I think it's something to be said for things being very short like tweets I'm not part of it you're part of it in most of this country and most of the world is on the streets usually they are but I don't get it most of the world is on the streets as a follow-up question we were playwrights, playwrights in many parts of the world especially in Germany the idea of the regittia where a director doesn't think that he can play as holy like in America or the UK what's written is written you don't cut things out change gender collage with other material kind of approach you would see them on and out museum is a Rauschenberg I mean, while they're playing at yours it's a beautiful game you should Freud or a bacon or a portrait of someone I think it's been translated into 35 languages I think Moses of Copenhagen must be a 20-year-old sword 25 what are your thoughts on what to do with the play what do you think we're working on in general and well as you can judge from my work I'm extremely interested in Germany I love Germany I'm very interested in modern German history particularly the history of the federal republic since the Second World War I do have an issue with what German is called a British theatre because it is a tradition in Germany that directors like to make their mark on text and this seems to me perfectly fair with long established classical texts because everyone has seen them many times before they've got some idea and it's fair to see somebody's blossomed it seems to me not such a good idea with new plays and it seems to me that the greatest directors whom I would say might have played more as well are able to work with the text and with the writer in order to bring the text alive and it is appropriate to endeavor but it's very much the actors and the writers are very much part of the creative process but it seems to me a good thing when everyone works together well this does happen in Germany there are fine German directors and there are really wonderful German actors particularly comic actors but they often don't get a chance to do their stuff because of this tradition of directors being the most in Germany and when the first production of Copenhagen was done in Germany it was going to tour all over Germany and I went to see the very first performance in the small town outside Bremen because it plays about a great German physicist and he was very keen that he should get a fair back with the work when it was done as a circus performance and in the course of the evening Eisenberg turned four back consoles and I think we met four of them back and Margarable we gave them a typewriter and whenever the men began to go I'm all bored about physics or politics, she had it on the typewriter so you didn't hear what they were saying and I thought it took against this production and it's not great to do it it has just been a production and it noises off in Hamburg it noises off in Hamburg all the time and mostly done quite straight and often in very good productions but it has just been a production at the Talia Theatre in Hamburg done not by a German director by a German director in which he decided that noises off were not comedy at all it was a model text warning that all entertainment was a ball of prostitution so I knew every single love from the play and I was supposed to be going to Hamburg to do events of my German Philippa my publisher he told me I think you better not come and see this so I didn't, I never did see I just heard about it and I'm pleased to say that that was a boomed on the opening night and of course noises off was a popular play in Germany he got attacked by every newspaper in Germany there was an article saying how could he do this to this traditional German classic but he worked the other way around because we mentioned Daniel Kale the Austrian novelist who now writes plays about five or six years ago he made a speech at the opening of a festival in which he attacked this tradition of a very cheap doubt and he was attacked in his term he said by every newspaper in Germany and I wrote to him off of my support program of what he said and he wrote back and said I wouldn't believe the level of hostility he had around and in one paper there was a liberal progressive paper there were five separate articles about his speech or about Daniel so it can go it can go both ways maybe one or two more questions you learned about what inspired noises off reminds me that I always said there's far more drama offstage than there is on and I say that because I'm a member of a couple of amateur theatre groups and if you're very brave for a few more weeks we are rehearsals for noises offstage to come see it the best of luck because I'm a rehearsal well the amateur is doing it which would really by those honest you have a question no I'm just wondering to come see our play if he's going to be here thank you for writing you never know how your audience is going to enjoy the play when the play company came to New York and there's so much publicity about the play that it actually affected the attendance of the play and Elizabeth Cander was one of the producers said at a meeting that we held that when they bought the play over they thought that it might last three months in New York whereas it lasted a year over a year in London so why did it only last three months she said well because after three months you run out of intellectuals a play actually went over ten months so that's a very good response I can also say that as a physicist my job is to really publish research in physics journals and my greatest claim to fame is when the play went on tour I was arranging different events in cities and I now have a career in labour so a physicist in labour because if there is anything there I can't forget of what Coventry did for me I said that and wrote it together to my brother who is in traditional science immediately I was so deeply moved so I was very struck by the response of scientists to the play because as I say I did learn the songs and I had to work very hard to break together some knowledge for it and of course I had the play read by a scientist but there were still a lot of errors in it when it was produced and I was struck by the generosity of the response of scientists who saw it who didn't say but if you don't know anything about science don't like plays about science but it would be very natural but they said I think if you look at this mind again you might wish to say molecule and really and they were so nice about it and I think those were nice about people scientists but the amateur I feel bad about them I feel bad about anyone doing noises of them when I have to go and talk to a new class of the revival but I say I'm only going to say three words that health and safety because so many actors have got hurt breaking that play and of course landing all the time in the staircase to four hours even building even building but there were a lot of actors but I was wrong in which something went wrong with the actor falling down on the stairs and he began to bleed because of this and the actor was playing in the doctor's office in the traditional key ring with a show going and he was smartly down the stage and trying to conceal it and the actor who was bleeding managed to get to within one line at the end of his part before he was moved by ambulance to the illegals so thank you all for coming if you could do whatever you want what would you really love to do when you were born to win a theatre project what would you work on and what would you love to do well as I say I'm just writing short sketches of the work of the girls Actualy it's the other the latest one is called The Playhouse and sometimes on the radio done from time to time in the production of Germany so you can see about the subject and the ideas of one place and what would I do if I could another long serious play in the tradition of Copenhagen and noise it off at the same time a test on check out a matchbox it's on VEC a radio it's for free so thank you all for coming here