 Martin E. Seidl Theatre Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY in Midtown. A man happened another day on planet Earth yesterday. We heard from Carol Martin in, I thought, a quite detailed and inspiring and with deep knowledge about the theater of the real, her observations on the current state of this theater, what is she is following. And I thought it was quite an important update. We had Yiddish Theatre on Wednesday. We heard from India last year, from the Ruhrfest Schiele, from the Theater de Welt and in our journey around the world. Today, we go to the UK and we haven't been there too often. I feel we hear many voices anyway from the British stage in America. There's any country that is close. The UK disintegrates, right? Yeah, the disintegration of the UK. It is the UK. I think people know more about British theatre than about Canadian theatre and vice versa. So with us today is a pioneer, I think, of the theatre we care about, the theatre we know, and it is the great David Goddard. David, where are you now and what time is it? And go a little bit backwards maybe so we see your face in the camera. Yeah, where are you? It's five o'clock, Frank, a very dull late afternoon. We've had about one and a half days of sunshine. I'm in a flat, which is tall, and where I handle lockdown very painfully. In London, right? In London, on the banks of the Thames. I'm surrounded by London Lomantos, if you like. In this very flat, the first Lesbian novel was written by and called Well of Loneliness, and I had neighbours like, or I didn't have neighbours. The flat had neighbours like Sir Oswald, mostly the wartime leader of the fascists who was arrested on the stairway. And General de Gaulle fought for the free French from this building. Incredible, incredible. That means in the flat you were in, people went through World War I, World War II, the resistance, the Spanish play, and now you are there in Corona for people who do not know about David. And I apologise that we cut his bio so much. David is a very influential, important figure in the global international avant-garde. He was an Issa Paolo, an artistic director, theatre maker and producer, whose influence has spent multiple generations from around the globe. He is most known for his work at the Great Riverside Studios in London at the time, when Beckett, when Kantor, when Giacometti, Tarkovsky, everybody who was anyone in this scene would come and go through the Riverside Studio. People who were close to the people from the Berliner Ensemble has deep ties to the Eastern European theatre and also to Arab theatre. It's way too much to go through here. He teaches student directors at the National Film School and the Birbeck University of London. He was for a short time at the Montclair State University. But more importantly, he is at the International Writers' Program at the University of Iowa with the Playwrights Workshop. It's a very important programme, one of the great, maybe the most respected writing programme actually in the nation. And David in 2019 was invited even to Buckingham Palace, if I understood right, to get an award for his service to Britain, the Kingdom, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth. So David, still go a little bit ahead of your back. We see mostly, we don't see your face so much. So tell us a little bit, how are you feeling in these days? How are you experiencing the time of Corona? How are things in London? Well, I'm not sure they're the same thing, but I think they're the same thing. Meaning as I suspected, getting over the pandemic or going to the next stage is more painful than when one was trying to kind of handle it really. Because one's frustration and anger at a wasted year can come out. And much of the year for everybody really was to do with confused signals. And so somehow we were very obedient, but we in a funny way knew not to trust anybody. And everybody was blaming everybody else. Politicians blamed the scientists. The scientists were on an alert. Now there's some kind of promise of a golden dawn, but as it's still pouring with rain, and as there's a threat that if we don't behave ourselves, we could have another one. We could have another lockdown. We're sort of nervous really. Just today I saw that numbers are already rising again in the UK of infections and death. Yes, because of the, not because of the, but because of the, you know, the idiot very popping up here and what have you. What about theaters? Are they open? Are they closed? Have you gone to theater? They're beginning to open just. But it's a picture. I find it quite difficult to discuss this specific point because when we talk about theaters with like the American concept of theaters, which is we're talking about a commercial world. And despite Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh playing a prominent part in the publicity for theater, which is always appreciated. And in a funny way, none of them really represent the theater that I've always known and had to fight for. Like I began at the Royal Court Theater, which was founded by George DeVine after the last great crisis, which is the Second World War. And he had a policy which was the right to fail. Well, of course, we don't have any language like that nowadays. What we have is somehow we're going to sell, sell, sell, and the economy is going to boom again. And that has no meaning to me. It is not part of my past. I am used to pool houses and people loving Tarkovsky or Dario Thoe or Good British Theatre. But that's because in a way, they decide they too want intelligent work. But once you start talking about what the revival seems to be about, which is Mamma Mia through to Phantom of the Opera, it's not that that is a different world, but it's to do with tourism and entertainment. And one's actually spent the whole of one's life slightly trying to articulate theater to the side of that. And above all, of course, including great figures like Bertolt Brecht, who are the figures who really should indicate the future. Because if one of the things has gone wrong, with the pandemic here is the political dishonesty sort of caught up with America, if you'll forgive me putting it that way. But just as you seem to be handling it with your presidential issue, we've gone into handling it, even though we don't believe our major political statements. And that what you're left with is what we've always cared about, which is that theater should be about the truth and the play should be about real issues. And we will have to go back to that somehow. And in the middle of it, you've always had pioneers from abroad, if you like, like Cantor, right? Who in their curious way fought and fought and fought and were practical and showed the way. So we're going to have to have that again, but we don't know what it means until it happens. But the great Royal Court Brechtian Revolution with new writing being about things that matter will now have to re-energize itself. And there's every indication it will. And of course, on certain fronts, like Black Lives Matter, write doing rather well with leaders and directors here like Kwame from Baltimore, when he was your side, launching the young Vic here, you know, very heavily on the black policy. That looks well for funding for the public and for talent. But there's a confusion there. And there always has been in theater, which is that entertainment and theater are sort of parallel, is how I would put it for the time being. And when I was in a funding to locate Cantor in London after a run at the Edinburgh Festival, I just had to believe that people wanted to see what I wanted to see, and they did, which is a sort of philosophy for theater, really, which is you can't have too much a theory. You've got to have a belief in special individuals who somehow will make the point and people will come and the theater will function. The other thing, which is boom time, four phantom of the opera, even though the great Hal Prince, and I mean it, has been educated by Piscator, right, is the kind of confusion that this thing called the media, which I don't quite know whether you've changed at all, but media here now is a different phenomenon. Almost nothing can happen without its permission. And that's why, for example, our greatest playwright, Edward Bond barely exists, and Edward Bond will be, and he's still alive, and Hal and Hardy, and he will probably be the first playwright to really write about this period. But nobody ever mentions him because that's not entertainment. Well, Carol Churchill is not entertainment. Sorry? Carol Churchill is not entertainment either. That is true, but Carol Churchill will stay in there because she will continue to rethink and have new ideas. But that curious kind of breakthrough way of challenging with theater, I find it very interesting because almost everything we talk about is to do with theater space, and how you move from one space or you conjure up a space, whether it's back to the Greeks or back to the globe theater. And this has been the period of confinement in space. It's made for dramatic changes in thinking about performance. How you escape space. Do you go out of one space into another, or do you go from one dungeon into another? We have a language, which is for being safe or for escaping, or we have all these facilities in language. But actually over quarantine or pandemic, we don't have that language. We have pretend language, and that's what the politicians are playing with. Which is don't worry guys, on the 21st, we're going to actually walk through a door, and you're going to be able to sit inside the pub, right, and England will be Churchillian again. Of course the great thing about modern English history is that after the war, when the English were meant to vote for Churchill, they didn't. Yeah, you lost the election. What do you think about theater? Your Riverside studio was such an exceptional place, and I have never heard of such an array of artists ever, in any place of the time, coming together, working there. And we are looking now, how should a theater function? What works? What doesn't? It has to be different corona, but things did work, and there were models, and I think the Riverside studio was one. Tell us a little bit. How did it become what it was? How did it start? What did the Riverside studio get right? What did they do right? Yeah, tell us. If you're foreign, it's by chance. In those days, you didn't do foreign work. If you wanted to do foreign work, and if you wanted to be English and be foreign, you went to the Mickery in Amsterdam, which in the 70s was a kind of show place, ready for the best of international European theater. And the rest of us did a travel to Berlin to see the Schalbunner or what have you. But what I would say is a great, this curious word, theory, which I think partly has never properly discussed between campus and theater itself, which is a great emphasis in theater should be on the practical. And one of the things that I think is still understated about a great man like Tadeusz Kantor is not his theory. And I'm not sure what that is, but in any case, it would be in the language of the history of art, rather than the history of theater, except like the best people, he admired a great British artist called Edward Gordon Craig, who the English never discuss or talk about. Over this side, he was the colleague of Yates at the Abbey Theater, where I've also been the social director. But my point about Kantor is that he was so busy gaining his achievements in art through freedom in a corrupt, dictator society, that we don't have the language for it because we assume that we didn't have to do that. And I suspect that as the future unfolds, we're going to have to fight for that kind of what I call practicality. It's called, how did Kantor get 20 artists regularly traveling to Ellen Stewart in New York and taking New York by storm at La Manma? Well, the answer is partly by having the full support of Ellen Stewart. But it was right day by day struggle for getting papers. We're back to that in England now. If I want to go to Italy for a theater meeting in a month's time, the first thing I've got to do is pay for a visa. And that's never happened in my life. My point being, the opening up of all of that will come with the energy and the work with all of doing the hard work and the paperwork. But there's a little picture about the Riverside Studio where is it at the center of London at the side? How did it look like? How did it come into being? The key thing about Riverside Studio is that it was given public money on condition that we didn't just practice theater, which at the beginning meant with Peter Gill who was quite already a much respected, is still a much respected English director and who launched the building one year after the dead class. And it was a film studio, right? At the banks of... It was the old Doctor Who studios and it was the film studios of Jack Buchanan. So you must imagine a world which belonged both to film and theater. So Jack Buchanan would come out of the West End Theater at 1030 or whatever, get his car down to Riverside Studios and film for the rest of the night. And the history, the history, the intertwining where one seems to be lodging something modern is very, very rooted in the historical, which is why I was pleased to throw in a reference to Michel Sandini earlier. Or, for example, I've just had a board meeting to reopen the Motley design course, you know, who designed more productions on Broadway than any designer. Right, well, we still have the design course and where funding will now come because there is a deep need for Black design training. And the money, therefore, will come because, and I'm not saying this cynically, Black Lives Matter and suddenly the money is available. But nobody was quite prepared for me to say at the beginning, look, sorry, guys, I know I talk a slightly different language, but you do realize that the longest run of Shakespeare on Broadway was designed by Motley and starred Paul Robeson as a fellow. So the intertwining of our history through these pandemics, wars which are worse than what we've experienced in the last year. And, but it's me taking theory into what I call hard work and practicality, rather like a film, like a rather like yourself, you know, that if you are Tarkovsky, your real genius is not in your theory, but in that you're getting the film done and paid for when it's not easily it's not easily recognized. How many people came? How many people fit in the Riverside studio? Why did you decide to have global work, the international artists, and did audiences come right away? They didn't. Come on, Frank. We've all got our equivalent experiences. Peter Gill had the talent to let us use the empty Doctor Who studios for a transfer from the Edinburgh Festival, which had taken the world by storm because of 20 minutes on the BBC of seeing the dead class. One week later, you've got Margot Fontaine and Rudolf Neuer, I have queuing outside to see it. Right, impossible to get a ticket. Okay, then you go to the next board meeting, which I won't have been at, but where I've heard, and the politicians will say, look, why are we spending money on the strange thing I've never heard of? Who are these strange Japanese people? And then the clever spokeswoman or director will say, well, I don't really know, but last month seemed to do okay. And it's a bit late now. We better endorse the next one. And then month by month, you build up something that gets response and something rather strange happened in Riverside, really, which is that people came because of the, what the building represented, not because of the specific art form. And I said, and so the great partnership at Riverside, for example, was New York Dance, that Judson took over Riverside, that Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown packed them in. So you hit another aspect, which is, I wanted to see these people and happily, through critics, if you like, the public did as well. But we were in danger of missing out on that generation in the 70s in New York before everybody started doing opera and big shows coming from the lofts of New York. And it was all, and because we shared social activities, beading bar, cafe, what have you, you know, it was rather nice to have a place where Trisha Brown met Samuel Beckett. How did Beckett come to the Riverside studio? Why would he come to that small, old, falling apart building? Well, primarily because there is the genius of a woman who designed Beckett's work. And he was George DeVine's partner at the Royal Court called Jocelyn Herbert, who was the designer of the Royal Court Guild in age. And Beckett loved her work and loved her as a fellow artist. And when Beckett had problems, which I'm not sure I can say accurately or properly, over going home to Dublin, the great writers of Dublin Theatre of Irish Theatre have this problem, which is they have a history of being banned by the Archbishop and God knows what else. And so having been, if you like, a little sentimental, but on the ball about what matters, Beckett responded to the San Quentin Company in the 60s when Rick Clucci, and by my time, using great American actors like Alan Mandel. And the San Quentin Company, let's just explain, it came out of the San Quentin prison in San Francisco, the Death Row legendary place. And Rick Clucci wrote to Beckett, said, can we have permission for doing Waiting for God in Death Row? And the 60s were so peculiar in one sense that we may need them again, I've realized, that they started touring to other prisons. And then before we knew it, I actually saw it on the fringe in Edinburgh. So somehow it became a means of freedom and Beckett fell in love with having a godson who was the son of Rick called Samuel Clucci, right? So by the time we get to the 80s, and I'm artistic director at Riverside Studios, the Abbey and Rick are asking Beckett to work with them. And he says, fine, then it will become a bit personal. He says, well, would you speak to, and that's how we met, although I'd been associated with him. I know your letters are included. At the Royal Court. Not in a leadership way. And so there was this peculiar area where Beckett didn't like going home. There was a really important area, my home, I mean, to Ireland, except for funerals. There's a specific area where this still goes on if you're reading your Times Literary Supplement at the moment, where Beckett appreciated his professors and experts, but was sort of nervous of working in public as it were, because people would just home on him. And I suppose I was sort of quite good at handling that, which is everybody belonging and being part of it, the building's geography suited it. And nobody got upset. And he started having such a good time that to this day, I meet somebody in the street of London who says, oh, last time I saw you, I had a coffee with Samuel Beckett, because Beckett was having such a nice time directing. Of course, they were, you know, strangers were trying to say hello and all that kind of business. So what was, if I may interrupt you. My tip is always only talk about two things, Guinness and Cricket. And it worked. That's a good tip. It works with Beckett and Irish in Excel. But tell us what worked. He loved directing. He loved directing. What work, how come the Riverside was a place for such great artists they felt at home? How was the relationship to the audience? What audience came? Well, it depends on whether you're being political or not. Like it got caught after a decade, true to kind of radical precedent. Because they came from everywhere. And your politicians do their survey of where your audience is coming from. And they're meant to come from what we would call the borough of Hammersmith, where the rate pairs are paying for the theater. But hold on. Only one third are coming from around here. The second third is coming from across the river. And the third third is coming from Hampstead. So you're hitting against that if you really are popular and you become, then it happens. It happens. But you've got to believe that you've got to believe, for example, well, let's say the most important thing I had to do with Beckett every morning was open the mail over coffee. And of course what you discover is you've got one of the most democratic men in the world that you're handling. Because it's like Kafka or something, which is there are people all over the world, certainly all over England, who could only get out of bed in the morning and wrote to him because they could exist it, or because Kafka existed, or because Dostoev, all these people that the middle brow, or the middle class, what do you know what it thinks are elitist, are actually popular people, but they speak to individuals everywhere. And these people turn up. I don't want to romanticize it any, but that is how. So I'm writing to you because I'm a striking minor. I'm writing to you because I've had a nervous breakdown. I'm writing to you because I'm in prison. And then in between all of this, I would have Beckett alert to his colleagues in Poland, or wherever it is, so that they would get authorization for doing the plays and carrying the letters and the envelopes and the food parcels sometimes. No, it is incredible. You also had so many artists, the Giacometti, Moniljani, you had Tchaikovsky working there, and you had audiences. So something was working. What was your vision at the time? What was your vision? Why did you make that theater for a woman? How is that relevant for today? You said something is lost. Let's say one thing that you'll understand, Frank, which is they were invited. And the thing about wonderful people is that they're ignored too. So you invited them by mail. You wrote a letter. Somebody wanted them to come. I wrote to them. I said, will you come? And of course, if you want to be cynical about it, it meant that I wasn't paying the huge fees that they, that Paris was paying. But like when Dario Foe home did Riverside, nobody else had invited Dario Foe to London, nor had since. So you've got somebody on your side. You've got somebody wanting to do the workshops, wanting to go into new territory and be supportive at the same time. But it is a curious thing. Don't forget the English have all, well, it's now. We know, according to the Times this week, that the BBC are in trouble because they didn't support Brexit. Right. If you were a foreign artist, you longed to be invited to London. Right. And nobody did it. So Dario Foe would have walked to London because somebody had invited him after all these years. And I saw that the kind of the London thing, and then this curious thing can happen, which you'll also get because you're a New Yorker, which is that if you had a success with the press in London, you then could go all over the world, which is what happened with Ganto, that a review in the Times at that time meant that you went straight to Tokyo. But we were not paying what, let's say, parrots with the backing of Pompidon. And I mean, I think I can remember Ganto specifically saying at one time, you know, there are two people I'm sentimental about, two places I'm sentimental about, and he knew how much we suffered, if you like. And he then, he would say, Ellen Stewart was one, and I was the other. It meant that we wanted him, and we didn't have money. But we paid fees and we, we got through that. And then it was fun to do. So the background is also tied to production values. Two things happened. One is we had, if you like, the production refugees from the Royal Court, who all wanted to do new work. And because they'd be in the Royal Court Theatre, they were the best people in the country. Right. And they would take a cut because it's the time when people are bored. Right. And I think it was the need for fresh air. And of course, politically, it was in trouble, because it's the, it's the beginning of that recession. It's Margaret Thatcher coming to a recession. So you go into a decade of being a football between political parties. And I'm talking about that, I'm talking about Dario Fo, we can talk about anybody. Cantor knew the game that had to be played. You talked about a new, discover new territory or new work. What does it mean to you? How did you single it out? You had that instant, so many artists you supported became significant ones or were already significant, but you saw that in the time also right now. What is important? What is significant? What did you learn? How did you do that? What is important? Well, I'm not Oxbridge. I was educated in Edinburgh. I began as a trainee director at the Traverse, which was, which is in itself a fascinating example of Langlow American creativity when a young graduate of the army gets one of those scholarships to study after the army and funds a paperback bookshop in Edinburgh that becomes the Traverse Theatre. And is our first kind of experimental theatre really with you know visits from Andre Serban and the rest. So kind of La Mama in Scotland was rather interesting. Sorry, go on, ask my question again. So what is new work, new territory? How do you define it? What was your vision at the time saying this is what I want to bring? Well, I think I'm saying that if you come from the right background, like from if you have the good fortune to come from Sierra Leone, let's say, you're not looking with the prejudices that you have if you're coming from Oxford. So new work is actually freshly new work, if you got me. I'm not saying it as a patronising thing. I'd say, and in a funny way, I think the visual arts world has been better at it than and the dance world over this period was to with Judson performance in New York. So that world represented or had led that had leadership with John Cage and Merce Gallingham and and the others on the whole was coming through into the visual arts and performance. It wasn't coming through to theatre as such. But I had a real education at the Royal Court with directors like Lindsay Anderson and William Gaskell. And we knew that new work was new writing that had an edge that was about something that was really going on in the world. And this had its fruits in what we're trying to talk about over the pandemic, which is George DeVine and the middle aged men coming back from the Second World War coincide, if you like, with the men who don't vote for Churchill in that they say, we're not going back to the English system, the English class system. And they say, we want a theatre that expresses that. Now, because they were the best actors in Hollywood and England, it meant that every time Edward Bond played to an empty house, they could ring up Noel Coward or Vivienne Lee and say, will you come and do a quick show for us because we've gone broke. And so they played that game. But new work in a funny way has to be new way of thinking of society. And the visual arts for a period has been very good at it. The period that I'm coming out of, which is Cantor, Joseph Boyce, Buckminster Fuller was there. Right, kind of radical thinking. And the funny way they coincide with an education in the early 70s. In other words, I mean, I've just gone back to reading Marshall McClellan, you know, who was a literary professor, by the way, English language. Or my neighbour in Edinburgh by chance was Chomsky, because we were opening, they were, I was only a student, they were opening a linguistics department. It was new territory. And one was clinging to a lot of that. And then by the time you get to the 70s, it's a recession time, Margaret Thatcher and everything that's happened since in her relationship with Ronald Reagan, if you like. But new, new, new work at the end of the day. You have to, in a funny way, you need a major artist to give language to. And Cantor was one of those. And Beckett was one of those. And we all know that the point about Beckett is that he had to find language that allowed him to write again after he'd seen the Holocaust. That is a man who'd been part of the resistance, which again was what he was a bit angry with the neutral island about. To be able to write, and writing in both languages helped him, French and English, but to be able to write such that you must go on, ironically, expressing final scenes in Chekhov, we've got to work on Kalanya. And that's what we're in now. And that's why I believe in working at problems, whether it's for the young, for the unemployed, for the people who are not going to get training, for education here going completely up the creek with Zoom, forgive me. You know, the understated, one of the understated stories here at the moment is the, is the students who are, who are panicking with Zoom. How did you, at the Riverside Studio, how did you combine these ideas on one way you brought over the Cirque Imaginaire, kind of a very popular work also? Yeah, they're great, but they are not, they are not, they are not, you helped for the black, for the tap dance movement. You know, you brought over the tap dancers, but nobody wanted to see them. So how, how important was this idea of popular theater to you? Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Hierre are the godparents of new circus and it's really because it's open with the world. And the fact that that switch into, switches into, let's say, incarceration across the river from me, where Charlie Chaplin's mother was in the mental hospital and he used to take her out to play in the park every day, and eventually she ends up, the grandmother, in a wheelchair overlooking the Pacific where her son has found at Hollywood, as they were, you know, and this is brilliant, brilliant daughter, Victoria and their children who focused really a whole new wave in, in, in circus, and that's terribly important because it's a bit like going to Buckingham Palace, you refer to, which is suddenly everybody knows what you're talking about. They'll come to the show, they're coming to the show, right. So, but you, you mentioned tap dancers, you did also, you presented the tap dancers from New York when they were, when they were not really presented. Okay. Here I'm more proud of than anybody. And it's that I'm in New York and I'm asked to meet a film student who's done his graduation film called No Maps Are My Taps, called Narenberg and George, and would I put on the figures, we were a film facility too, Greenway did a lot of work at Riverside. Greenway, yeah, you knew him. Yeah, yeah. And, and so I look at the film and in my usual irresponsible way in inverted commas, I say, okay, we'll launch the film and then we'll have an interval, right. And the real thing can come on, meaning these wonderful dancers in their 70s and 80s who no longer found work in Harlem or in New York because Variety was dead and were doing community projects in Harlem. And so you have, you have these group of people trained by Bojangles, right, who, one of them also starred on Broadway called Honey Coles, who did My One and Only with Twiggy. But they were old men who thought it was never going to happen again. And suddenly, they were so classy, the world wanted them. And then you have another partnership, which is relevant to the time, which is the BBC started doing programs about them, making films about them, a new wave of good filmmaking at the BBC. And so the whole kind of woodwork of Harlem left in Europe with great people now doing Harlem workshops, but legends, you know, I mean, the last time I did a concert with one of them, the musical director was the avant-garde composer, Gavin Brier. So one mixed them all up a bit. But it meant, you know, one night I've got Honey Coles on stage with a little jazz band, right, packed with people. And this little old lady joins him for the curtain call. And he brings her to meet me afterwards. And she's in her 80s. She's called Adelaide Hall. Now, David, you've got to realize, this is jazz history. This woman invented scat. She's the woman who's in the wings at the curtain, oh, at the curtain, he's recording something. And he hears this woman humming. He's the killer you can do. And so they record the Creole love song together. Right. And of course, since the 30s or whatever, she'd been in Paris and London as a refugee from racist New York. Because not only did they have to handle the Cogman Club implications and they had to handle, for example, if they had to handle not jazz singers, but it's like Elizabeth Welch, they had to handle Broadway. They were handling a segregated audience. And so they found kind of home in wartime Europe. And we're still going in the 80s. And so we made documentaries with them. And one of them was back singing with Derek Jarman in the Tempest. And it goes on. They are gold dust. The Harlem generation are gold dust. And they are as avant-garde as anything Robert Wilson would want. Absolutely. So this is incredible. Let's summarize a little, but you said, you know, you have to discover new territory. You do new work. It has to be about truth, a social movement, kind of an imagination for a change of the society as it is has to come first. It will be expressed by artists. You mixed up things as a curator. You invite great people, people who are not just not invited. You wrote the letter, but you also then put them together with others. You had interdisciplinary. You had a film, you showed them like Ben Duster, but I know also you were close to architecture, visual arts. You also directed, you did the Hamlet, which you did in Eastern Europe and went to the Arab world and then also to Japan. What does art mean for you? Why did you dedicate your life to art? And what does it mean now? What should we expect from it? I think I represent without knowing it most of my life. The majority of people, maybe, who grow up looking to the clouds and wondering what the journey is. And of course, we strongly feel that at the end of the pandemic, right? And somehow you keep going forward little by little, and eventually it makes sense. But you don't put on Thaddeus Cantor because he's going to change the art world. You put on Thaddeus Cantor because he asked me to. And I knew that if I didn't make that summer work, even with the relationship with the good Richard DeMarco, 20 poles, we're going to have a ruined summer. That old thing of Eastern Europe, you know, that you are either going to give people a turn or they were going to have another miserable year. And so you did it. It's like everything in any radical situation. It's not that you decide, but it's that you open the door and somebody says, help me and you do it. And the arts relationship with you. I worked with Tarkovsky. I helped Tarkovsky not because I was rich, but because I had the will to say, just give him the money for his last film. And having been invited to do that. And it's something that the public as a home prop would not know about. But nearly everybody of real significance in the history of the arts has a time when they are like a student, which is they say, how do I get my work done? You know, and if you like in London, I haven't gone on this far. It's a pity to get this far really by saying, well, of course, there was always this shining example who's still alive happily in London called Peter Brooke. You know, who who who who abandoned the Royal Shakespeare Company and commercial success really, but was given money by France, which was one of the options in the world to do with their history. But, but on the whole, I went my way because it interested me. And by the way, that old thing, which is, okay, if you're going to fire me, I'd rather be back directing anyhow. You know, but I couldn't make it happen for 10 years. And every Latin American radical knew they'd get me in 10 years and they did. For the usual thing, which was elitism. The list of complaints Tarkovsky films with foreign subtitles, and so on and so forth. Dario foe in the original. Why didn't I do Dario foe with the local pottery class? That's what politics becomes in England. And I'm sure you have the equivalent. And of course, there was nothing, nothing that reached the quality of seeing Dario foe on stage. Yeah, it's one of the greatest things I ever saw. And then remember, of course, we even went through our little chapter where we couldn't come in. He couldn't come into America. So we were all there in the fight. And so you say, well, David, Goddard, what's he doing? Why isn't he directing? What's he supposed to be? You say, well, sorry, I spent a month or two as part in a humble way as part of the fight to get Dario into America. And we did it. But I'm making it sound like nobility. It's not nobility. It's called practicality. And that's where the cantors of this were. The key thing that mattered with Tarkovsky through that whole period was how to get his son out of Russia, because the son and grandmother had been kept behind as emotional blackmail over Tarkovsky leaving. And so the most important thing I ever did was to run a committee for getting the son out of Russia, which politicians held out on. And eventually, Mitterrand did it. Of course. And it goes on like that, really, which is they don't know. But this is how you have to. And so for example, hold on, Tarkovsky's going broke. Claudio Bardo was saying to me, we've got to get him some money. Right. I said, what are you talking about? This is Tarkovsky. The head of Channel 4 turns up for one of his lectures. Jeremy, you do realize he's going under. Oh, bring him in on Monday morning. You get the money. It's not that it's easy, but you have to be prepared to say it and ask for it and do it. And we all know that the arts world is riddled with those people. So you know, the arts world is a phantom of the opera is coming back to the west end of London with a West End, with a reduced orchestra. Right. The great director of Phantom of the Opera, Hal Prince, to me, is a man who used to meet me regularly because he loved the Cirque du Masjidère. And because he always wanted the right space for his Piscata principles to do Kandid, where the audience can be in the center and the action happens all around the outside. Right. That's real fundamental need in a commercial world, if you like. And so if you have, for whatever reason, if you get away with something which is probably even more difficult at the moment, which is making decisions as an old fashioned artistic director, rather than somebody who's got a acid education now, go before the chief executive, then you nip it in. And if the audience comes and if a critic is there, and I'm educated on Edward Bond on making history as he did, despite what a critic says. And Edward Bond, as you know, very well, had to go to Germany before he came back as English history. In London, he was empty houses. And then Germany, Teata Hoeter, photogenic theater, and he's back, part of the syllabuses. And there he is living quietly. And everybody talks about the new Tom Stoppard biography. Nobody's talking about Edward Bond. So it goes, the battle goes on. What did you learn from Brecht? But how important was the Bolina ensemble in your thinking? Fundamental. It's like Beckett in that the Royal Court really aesthetically wouldn't have existed without them. And it's because they came to London in the fifties, not just because Kenneth Tynan did his number in as a critic. But George Devine, Jocelyn Herbert, these key people, they went to see the work. And they said, this is what we must do. And it gets very confusing in England, because the English went puritanical over Brecht. They kind of said, Oh, well, if we're doing Brecht, he's got to be miserable. We mustn't have any color. We mustn't have any real acting. Because all the opposite of what the Bolina ensemble was. But but somehow it's effect on the Royal Court directors, which was one of the beauty of minimal design, but not wasteful decoration, which is the key area. Again, so if the papers are now going to say we got to have our theater again, we got to have the English tourist industry, even though we hate foreigners, right? You know, there's a big problem here, which is that if you pile on decoration or whatever the word is, you can have your coach loads of Swedish tourists for Mamamina, but you won't have the quality of the work that makes the art form continue. Yeah, the quality of work you did. You went to Berlin, right? You went to the Soros and you went to the Bolina ensemble. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm a good boy, you see. I got on with my friend Barbara Brecht. You know, Stefan and Barbara, they played a role, which is and partly they represent Brecht himself, which is it was a life of fucking, sorry, forgive me, of suffering. They lived a life of suffering. And I've been thinking of this model today, although this kind of coming out of a door, going into a resting place, something opening up, something being more free. Brecht had to do it from country to country. You know, Barbara Brecht was a little girl growing up in Hollywood. Not so long ago before she died, she wanted to see her house in Hollywood. So she left the chauffeur behind, went up the garden path, rang the doorbell, explained who she was and who her father had been and was shown around the house. She was a little girl from Hollywood and through it all and through all the hell of Ulbricht and East Germany, somehow they made positive things happen. And we're still living with all of that. But as you also know, we're still living with a world where, for example, particularly arguably in Japan, or at least Mishima thought so, we've still not really liberated the Japanese situation nor the German situation. And that kind of extraordinary life of, which is what we need, we need a Brecht, we need a Brecht. Germany had, I mean, and others, Germany had Brecht and Haenemude. And Haenemude. But the fact that Brecht went to school in Provincial Town with a genius of a designer, Kasper Nehe, who was the real influence on British design, right, is just one of those miracles really. But then, unwind, unwind, unwind, unwind, whatever we're saying, how do you come back to Shakespeare or something? It's all there, it's all there, it's all there. It's all there. It's incredible. Teriyama came to you, you know, you hosted so many also of the Japanese avant-garde. It's incredible. If you, what is your advice from your experience for young artists, young directors, young artistic directors, who are taking over that, what would you say, listen, I want you to know this, this is what I learned, this is important. I'm partly doing the opposite for the first time in my life. I'm so depressed by the last year. And what I mean is, I have spent the whole of my life doing what a country mother told me, which is you're not getting a bicycle because you passed the exam, you got to do it because you want to and believe in it. And I have always told filmmakers or whatever it is you believe in, you've got to go forward. Because of what it's been like in the last year or two, I now say to young people, don't worry that the drama schools are using you as fodder for making masses of money in a ghastly British way. Just get yourself a bit of security so you can look after your family and feel secure so that you then can involve yourself in the arts and right as well, hopefully. But it's the first time I've acknowledged that, that if you don't give yourself, because I mean, because London is full of noble sons and daughters of Europeans who are working in Starbucks, becoming managers and being sent to Korea to open Starbucks, but they're Hungarian or they're Italian. And they're in London partly because probably they're in love with somebody in London, meaning another European. And there's been something fascinating about the whole thing as ever with London. But it's not a romantic thing, but it has been about real suffering. And I think they've been very noble young people to somehow know that they can do it. You can do a job and write your film. And somehow it'll all work out because of the way the world's got to come together. Even like you, I'm post-war. I have a different story to tell. The world kept getting better all the time. I was thinking today, I want hair to come back. I want everybody to take their clothes off. I want everybody to touch everybody else. That was hair, man. That was the mama. And as I'm in this very room, the Nobel will have gone and there'll be a speechless young businessman in his early 30s who can't even talk because he's so depressed about what's going on, meaning mental health we're going into everywhere. And until we're into handling these problems, talking about it, you know, who gives a toss about Andrew Lloyd Rubber? I mean, and what he represents if you got me. But so that's what I believe in. I still believe in democratic intelligence in a slightly romantic way. But that's because I'm a bit Deage Lawrence like in that I'm from an area that's not meant to exist. His is his is Nottinghamshire dialect. He wrote plays in Nottinghamshire dialect. Imagine being that stupid. And they're wonderful plays. But he doesn't know more and more. The reason why Scotland's got to separate is that our world does not believe in the smartness of Southern England. Very, very, what's happening here? Yeah, you monitor over decades, you know, you have monitored the British theater, you know, so many, I guess everybody have never seen anybody so connected in in a theater landscape than you when I was in London. So what is wrong at the moment in London theater and what could be done to make it different? But don't forget when you do that, and you've got the equivalent I'm sure when you do that, it's not because you make a theoretical decision. It's because that's all you can do. It's like opening the door on there's somebody who's wounded. I mean, the first time I was in a room with Marina Abramovich in a in a gallery. She made a mistake and her wrist started bleeding on broken glass. I thought get me out of here. And instead of course, there I was binding, not because I'm a noble person, but but that's because what you have to do. You do. So what does theater what does theater has to do now in your case in London, the face of what do you think is of urgency? What is needed? I whatever it is, there's little sign of it at the moment. Because it's to do with a key area of this pandemic, for example, whereby we all knew the future has pandemics. There's another headline in the evening paper I read today, saying the next one's going to be worse. Okay, great. I think I'll go to bed. Right. In other words, that area that we who were educated the sixties knew about which is kind of intelligence and problems, which somehow because of the experience of 20th century, you can't turn into ideology, right? But somehow, whether it comes from the unemployed or the young or from minority groups or whatever it is, it's somehow making problem solving coincide with the knowledge that we have. And you can't do that so long as we have a folly over money. And so long as that understanding goes with historical understanding of 20th century. And like you, forgive me saying like you, but one can but hope one's there tomorrow problem solving. But if somebody, I'm just saying, I'm really saying, I don't feel very romantic in one sense because I know that the noble friend who would say, look, work on this commercial script, the reason why I don't do it is not because I'm a noble savage, but because I can't, I don't know how you do it. Whereas if you bring me strange language from an individual who's emerged from a village or what have you, literally manager of the Royal Court, Wally Simpson, N.F. Simpson, N.F. Simpson, permanently called me Polish. It meant that if he couldn't understand the script he'd be sending, he'd just send me because he's a Polish. And then you realise it's just a privilege that you've hit against a Kantor or a Becker or what have you. But it's about problem solving. And I think, well, you're there. But I mean, it's also somehow radicalising education again. What do you think? Will writing be more important, less important? I've had a wonderful time with writing during the pandemic. But it was all virtual. I've got about six writers raring to go, who I barely met. But boy, did we need each other on the phone and on the computer. That was my world out of this room. And, you know, once in Denmark, once the editor of the shooting times writing his first fiction. Right. And the Iowa thing is a blessing. And I'm very lucky because I started with a year of special people, meaning Nermi Wallace, Rebecca Gilman, David Hancock, Todd Ristow at Hollins. And of course, my role is I'm the Londoner. Which is, you know, if you can be in London, it is easier to get an agent or what have you. But I was lucky. I had a very bright year at my first year at Iowa. You know, as you know, the fact that two or three years ago, it meant that I had a very talented Iraqi veteran, such that we fed into veterans writers workshops and what have you. You know, the kind of the Iowa thing is gold dust. What did you read? What did you read? What did you listen to in this year? What inspired you or what helped you this last year? Yeah, besides your writing. Wordsworth for the first time. What? Wordsworth for the first time. Oh, wow. The prelude, which they say you can't read because it's a banal or whatever. And of course, he turns out to be like Hamlet. And the great thing if you've got a certain background is rediscovering your own culture literature. Because I didn't come from bourgeois literature, right? Oh, I kind of fascinated the moment that best writers coming from Iowa or related places seem to be transgender Eastern Europeans who've all been picking up boys in libraries in Bulgaria. I'm caricaturing, you know, where people are coming from. Or that, or that, well, you see Dickens, I discovered today, he really did want to incarcerate his wife when she lost her looks. Incalceration, quarantine, go on and on and on. You know, the history of the theater is riddled with it. So you can, but what books? I've got them nearby really. The person who I find most important actually, who I can look you in the face of is Daniel O'Keeche, you know, the great Yugoslav novelist, who is Jewish, Hungarian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and who lived just long enough not to be a nationalist and to warn against nationalism. And he happily had a friend in Susan Sontag who promoted publishing, was publishing. Daniel O'Keeche, who is so difficult, that I peep at him, I peep at him, because he's so bogasian and breaks all the rules and writes lists for three pages or something. Yeah, so it was a time of rediscovery and connecting, you know, this idea of quarantine, to theater our lives, politics the 20th century. Well, after the last line of Shakespeare that I rediscovered this morning was I bring the brush that sweeps the dust from behind the door, which is park, of course. So you can't have the fairyland, you can't have the magic of it all, if you haven't got the broom. And that's my potential point, which is the work, the work, the Czechovian work. And this curious thing, which is rediscovery, which is discovering that that Czechof was Peketje, we must go on. And that extraordinary way that Beckett, like Shakespeare and Euripides have always been there. You know, that when I was directing Shakespeare, very successfully in Kosovo, and resurrecting National Theatre, as we went from line to line with a great Albanian translator dead, who became a professor at Harvard, right, called Fan Nolli, right. Shakespeare was there, man. He'd seen massacres, you know, that his knowledge of what happened in Europe and it's just a miracle. And it means that you can have the final wall. It means that not only are you excited yourself of what's in the language, but eventually you see there is an audience of ordinary people who got it. Like in Kosovo, as an ambassador put it to me, you could see that it was the means whereby a lot of people could mourn. This is something unique that theatre can produce, can do. And as you said, you know, Shakespeare was there, Czechof was there, Peketje was there. So there is a line. David, we are already much over time. Thank you for really sharing a moment in life, sharing your thoughts, your brain. You have the highest respect from all of us of your life's work. What you did at the Riverside Studio is amazing. It is incredible, it's inspiring. One could only hope that it's such a place by coincidence, as you say, of an old film studio where someone is asked to do something, to bring something over from, you know, that worked here and something grows out of it. It became so meaningful and that this happens again now. And as you said, it's a post for you, you are the post-war generation. We are anyway, and we can only hope that those young kids, you talk to teach to others, you know, will come out. It's a great privilege. You'll have a wonderful time with Emily. Yeah. So next week, yeah, to talk about next week, you know Emily Manche will be with us next Thursday. She has been for 30 years she went to MacArthur Theatre in Princeton, did so much significant work, also very well known for work on the documentary theatre we will talk about also with Carl Martin. We will have Fergus Linehan from Scotland who runs the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. He will be talking to us what it means now, where they are. I mean, they are planning to have it open, but still, nobody knows really what it was, so we will get a real update. And then we will have, as David will say, the Europeans who come to the capital, Johanna Versaba, from Poland, who lives in Boland. They created work on the balconies in Prenzlauerburg. Artists who live there as a high consideration of artists, opened their balconies. They created two editions of a festival that happened on balconies. People loved it. It was a great contribution to that time of Corona. So we will hear an update from them. Thanks to Hal-Ram for hosting us, VJ and Sia. This is wonderful, Andy, for helping to produce it and to our listeners. And David, you know, it's a really, really a great record what you're living in your influence. And we touched only the tip of the iceberg. It goes so much, so much deeper. So really, thank you, congratulations on your work. And it's a hard time, it's a depressing time. But as you point out, there is something in there that has always been with us and will come back. So let's see how we get through it. And we hope that something will also grow out, like a mushroom, as you said, you know, from in the landscape of London that will be inspired. You feel it, you bite it. You feel it bit by bit. Yeah, yeah. Okay, David, thank you. So great that it worked, that the Zoom worked out. And now you're back to your historic room and stay in contact with us. So thank you. And thanks to all of everybody in there who helped you to connect to Zoom. There was an important talk and a great record to have you with us. Thank you. And bye bye to everybody. I hope you will be with us next week and have a great Memorial Day weekend. Thank you.