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Here we go!

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For the great firework!

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People ask me,

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"Do the English people want

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"a national theatre?"

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Well, of course, they don't.

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They never want anything.

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They've got a British Museum,

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but they never wanted one.

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They've got a National Gallery,

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but they never wanted it.

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But now that they've got it,

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now that it stands there as a mysterious phenomenon

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that came to them in some type of fashion, they quite approve of it.

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It wasn't until 1963

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that the long-held dream of a national theatre of Great Britain

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became a reality.

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Its first home was the borrowed stage of the Old Vic theatre

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in London, which had been putting on legendary productions

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of Shakespeare since the 1930s.

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At the helm of the newly-formed National Theatre

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was Laurence Olivier, the greatest actor of his time.

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Forming a company, helping it along, serving it, leading it -

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that's the most exciting thing I think a man can do.

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'If there was going to be a national theatre, Olivier would have to be

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running it.

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He represented the theatre

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in a symbolic way.

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APPLAUSE

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Your Royal Highness, lords, ladies and gentlemen,

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this is a joyous occasion.

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The National Theatre is to be something

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which the Old Vic is dedicated to,

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'with Laurence, who is a passionate lover of the theatre.

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'A fine actor, Laurence has got that feeling that

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'we are doing something for our country, something to make

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'our country more aware of itself.'

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As Shakespeare is,

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kind of, the spine of British playwriting,

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Olivier, during that period, was the spine

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of British acting. Everybody wanted to work at the National.

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And it was at the Old Vic, which, itself, had this extraordinary

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history.

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It was an actors' theatre,

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in that it was run by the greatest actor we had.

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It was not an inevitability

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that it would get off the ground, by any means. Once it was

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off the ground, it was not inevitable that it would survive.

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That it survived, that it succeeded in the most extraordinary fashion,

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that was all due to Olivier.

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Olivier was able to bring the directors and the writers

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and, above all, the actors.

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Olivier himself directed the opening production of Hamlet in 1963,

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starring Peter O'Toole.

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Laurence said, "When you start the National Theatre after 300 years

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"of talking about it and you open with Hamlet,

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"you just put on your strongest suit of armour

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"and expect everybody to take aim

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"at you", which, of course, I think they did.

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The following year, Olivier's own sell-out performance as Othello

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was a huge critical success.

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And Peter Schaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun

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heralded the National's commitment

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to new plays by contemporary writers,

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including Harold Pinter,

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Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Alan Bennett.

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The Old Vic was always meant to be a temporary home, until a new theatre

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could be built on the south bank of the Thames.

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Olivier, constantly had to defend its cost and its severe modernist

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design.

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Would you argue for it to be

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given priority, for example, over hospitals and schools?

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I don't think anything should be given priority over hospitals

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or schools or houses, but would point out that, in Germany,

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it would be given priority over all those three things.

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The new building housed not one, but three, separate theatres.

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It still looks like a fortress, until you get inside.

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The grandeur of the Olivier is one thing.

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The Lyttelton is not unlike the West End,

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cos of the feeling in the theatre and the proscenium arch.

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And then, the Cottesloe is like off Broadway,

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so what you have got

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is off Broadway, Broadway and the Metropole and Opera,

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all in one building.

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In 1976, the new theatre finally opened

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and Laurence Olivier took to the stage that bears his name

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for the first, and last, time.

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By now, he'd been succeeded as director by Peter Hall,

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founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company,

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the National's main rival.

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Peter took over the National Theatre at a difficult time,

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at a time when there was a lot of political opposition to the very idea

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of it. He had to be enormously

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persuasive. He had to face that political opposition down

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and he also had fights with

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the building, which was late being delivered, the unions,

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the backstage unions.

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So, Peter had to face all that and he was directing plays at the same time.

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It's only in retrospect

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that one can say it was OK. Damn nearly wasn't.

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Peter Hall was the second of five directors

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who have run the National Theatre.

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He was succeeded by Richard Eyre.

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Well, it's wonderful to sit in the director's office

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and be able to look down river to the Houses of Parliament

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and also poke your head round the corner and see St Paul's.

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So, it's impossible, I think, to be in that office and not feel

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that you have a responsibility to reflect the feeling of a nation.

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That is what the theatre exists to do.

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Richard Eyre was

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followed by the celebrated director, Trevor Nunn.

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I had a wonderful time,

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mainly because I found myself working with

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such an extraordinary number of wonderful people.

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The level of expertise

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and of sheer excellence, in all departments, was very rare

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and instantly recognisable.

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You can choose to go to a theatre

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where it just does one play or you can go to the National,

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where you can see a constantly-changing repertoire,

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all under one roof and in a way you can afford.

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The first time I walked through the stage door of the National Theatre,

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my life changed. I would meet people at the stage door

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all the time and they'd go, "I've never been here before.

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"Has this been here long?" Do you know what I mean?

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And here we are -

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50 years. 50 years.

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MAN WAILS

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Speak! Or go no further!

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I am my father's spirit.

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Doomed for a certain term...

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..to walk the night.

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In our contemporary, essentially-rational,

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highly-politicised world,

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what would it be like

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if somebody's ghost pitched up?

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It would be utterly terrifying, completely unprecedented

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and nobody would know what to do.

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Well, actually, Shakespeare goes to a great deal of trouble

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to make the appearance of this ghost exactly that.

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'This ghost is unprecedented, in the lives of all the characters

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'onstage and they react to the ghost as I think we would react

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'if we saw a ghost.'

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In other words, in Elsinore, or London, 1601 -

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take your pick - ghosts do not appear.

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Hamlet is, in many ways, the foundation stone

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of the English theatre.

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What else?

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It was first performed not a mile

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from where I am currently sitting,

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at The Globe, in 1601.

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Remember me...

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It's been in the repertoire for 400 years.

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..in this distracted goal.

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-Remember thee...

-Every great actor has played Hamlet.

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From the table of my memory

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I'll wipe away all trivial fond records that youth

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And observation copied there.

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And thy commandment all alone shall live

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Within the book and volume of my brain

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Unmixed with baser matter.

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What a piece of wood is a man. How noble in reason.

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How in faculty, in form, in moving. How express...

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And now I'll do it!

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Until he goes to heaven.

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The one thing we can't get is what the audience in 1601 got,

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which was it must have seen its own world on the stage.

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We can only be voyeurs of a play like Hamlet.

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We don't live within a totalitarian dictatorship, which operates

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through a security system based on constant surveillance.

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Shakespeare's audience was living in that world.

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That's how Elizabeth I exerted power.

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I've come at it with the idea that Elsinore itself

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is a totally contemporary dictatorship

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with a highly-developed surveillance operation -

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everybody spies on everybody else.

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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are brought in to spy on Hamlet,

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Polonius spies on Laertes.

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Everybody's watching everybody else.

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-Nobody is honest with everybody else.

-I will come by and by!

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The major strokes of the production are in creating that world

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with the security guards, which is incredibly detailed

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and followed through.

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There will always be people there watching,

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menacing shadows in the background.

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Not allowing people

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to live their lives, except under pressure.

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No-one trusts anybody else. No-one says what they mean.

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That is especially clear in this production

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because of all the cameras and the agents monitoring everything.

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Ophelia, in her first scene, she is reading a book.

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When her dad comes in, she hides the book.

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You get the idea that everything is monitored,

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what they are allowed to read, what they are allowed to listen to.

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I think it's familiar to a lot of people around the world.

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METAL CLANGS

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Originally, we were looking at potential modern parallels,

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somewhere where, through murky politics,

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leadership can still pass through family lines.

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METAL CLANGS

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A world in which people don't have a sense of their own freedom or

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a sense of the individual being more important than the state.

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MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH

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Murder and surveillance, as a wing of state policy...

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..you don't have to go far east to find those.

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MUSIC DROWNS SPEECH

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There are such dictatorships in Europe where you can imagine

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the presidency passing from one brother to another.

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There is plenty to draw upon there.

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Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

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I think the memorable Hamlets emerge in response not just to the play

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but to the place in time they are happening in.

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Rory's dismay is a very 21st-century dismay.

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It is a dismay based on a highly-developed

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ironic intelligence.

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But it is also based on a super sensitivity to the impossibility

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in this spied upon, surveyed,

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utterly un-private world.

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Here is somewhere our audience will know what

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we're talking about.

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Bloody, bawdy villain!

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Is it possible any more,

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surveilled, picked apart pulled this way and that

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as we are, to act truthfully?

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HELICOPTERS WHIR

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What's really important, it seems to me,

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is that the Army is central to this play.

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It's something I know that we'll want to explore -

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what a life spent fighting, what a life spent devoted to violence

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has done to the men who are at the centre of the play

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and to the women who find themselves caught up in the drama.

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Jonathan, who arrived late, who I hope will be able

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to talk to us at some point, was until recently

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a pretty high-ranking general in the British Army.

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I gave them advice on how to dress, how to wear their berets,

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how to wear their clothing.

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All of them took that on board and you can see them,

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they all look proper soldiers.

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There is one exception to that and that is Rory himself with Iago.

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No matter how many times I told him about wearing his beret

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slightly tilted forward or flat but certainly not tilted backwards

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and do something about the knot at the back

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because it's dangling down, he wouldn't.

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His trousers were scruffy. They run down over his boots.

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I kept saying, "You should alter that." Then I stopped saying that

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because actually that is the way he is portraying the character.

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Jonathan Shaw has been extremely interesting about

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the military context of the play.

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One of things he insists on,

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is how important trust is between men in the Army.

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It is quite clear that the reason Iago is able to do

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what he does with Othello, is because Othello trusts him

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more completely than maybe two men in civilian life would trust each other.

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It's a given in the Army. You have to.

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Let command and to obey in me

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Shall be remorse what bloody business ever.

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Come here.

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Military life is based on

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loyalty and a code of honour amongst soldiers.

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And it's from that that Iago is able to get away with what he does

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that no-one would question another soldier's loyalty to his colleague.

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Now art thou my lieutenant.

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Their bond of friendship and mutual trust goes back years.

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That is why Iago feels betrayed because he believes that

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seniority, length of service should be what determines promotion.

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His standing in the structures of military life was pretty low,

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although he had a closeness with Othello, who was at the very top.

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When passed over for promotion and having his nose rubbed in

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his mediocrity, it's that trigger that snaps him into

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doing something about it.

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Good evening. After a weekend of doubt and uncertainty,

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Mr Heath has handed in his resignation to the Queen.

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# We've got five years

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# Stuck on my eyes

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# Five years

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# What a surprise

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# Five years... #

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I wanted to look at the Houses of Parliament under the most strain

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it's ever been under in the history of modern Britain.

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That was absolutely the Parliament of 1974-79.

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It was a government with not enough people to pass its laws,

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it was a country in absolute turmoil economically, socially, politically.

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# Five years... #

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For me, politics was never something that was alienating or strange.

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I think if you're going to lock people in a room for two hours

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and talk to them, then it has to be important.

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I feel like you've got to leave having talked about stuff

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and having engaged with things that are important.

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Political issues do that.

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THEY SHOUT

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The default position of younger writers is that maybe

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we don't have the right or the tools to write these big political plays

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and that we should just write small plays about our own staff.

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I've never believed that is true.

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I don't know if any of you lot have read a newspaper this week

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but apparently we, the Labour Party, are now in power.

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CHEERING

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One big problem.

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It's a mathematical problem and one we definitely have to balance.

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301, us, Tories, 297. Then we have the odds and sods.

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Excellent. Great. Yeah, that's good. Just a little. Yeah.

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The play is focused on the two whips' offices.

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The Government whips' office and the Opposition whips' office.

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They are the unsung heroes

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of parliamentary procedure - they make it happen.

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There's only three in it.

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Block some of their big stuff and call a confidence vote.

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How do we block them?

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Our lot will be bored and demoralised.

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It's going to take all we've got to keep them coming in for votes

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all the time.

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The other side seemed to have successfully seduced

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the odds and sods.

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I wanted to forget Downing Street,

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to forget Whitehall,

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forget anywhere where the decisions were made

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and look at the engine room.

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When you have a hung Parliament,

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when you don't have enough members to pass your laws.

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Suddenly everything becomes focused on the Whips' office.

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They're the guys who literally have to get that law onto the statute

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books and so the whips become the most important people in politics.

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When I came into Parliament at the end of the '80s, it was

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very similar to the play and in particular, the Whips' Office

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was a whole world on its own, a kind of independent barony.

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Parliament is like a theatre and the Whips' Office

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was almost like a theatre within a theatre.

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Try to act like honourable members of the House

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and not football hooligans!

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The political culture

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when I first came into Parliament was very masculine, very male.

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People were much less concerned about how they looked,

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because of course, Parliament wasn't televised in those days.

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There was a hard-drinking political culture

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and it was the opposite of politically correct.

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-Just don't feel you have to tone it down.

-Sod that! Bird in the office - we'll be cranking it up!

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Do you like football?

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# The love that asks no questions

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# The love that stands the test of time. #

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I didn't know a huge amount about the 1970s.

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I was born in 1982, so I wasn't alive.

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I really loved going and speaking to Members of Parliament at the time,

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diving into archives, papers -

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thousands and thousands of books and um, just speaking to people that were around at the time.

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For me, that's the fun part of doing a political play.

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Tories, we need a little bit more reaction to the vote.

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This is a crucial loss for the Government, isn't it?

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What's wonderful is that every time we came up with

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a sort of dramatic problem that we found hard to solve, you know,

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just a bit of research

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and look at history would provide a really entertaining answer,

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because the reality is just far more interesting that anything

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anyone could make up.

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# Time takes a cigarette. #

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Well, I'm afraid we now think he must be dead.

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For example, John Stonehouse,

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when the Government's just about got enough of a majority to start

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passing laws, he fakes his own death

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and throws himself allegedly into a sea off Miami beach.

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MUSIC: 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' by DAVID BOWIE

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And then you have stories like Jeremy Thorpe,

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the leader of the Liberal Party, who was accused of attempted murder,

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cleared of all charges, it has to be said but he was accused of murdering his male lover.

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I look at it and go, "God, how am I going to fit that into this?

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That's one story of 25."

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CLAMOURING

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We are now in session.

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Sorry to interrupt. I'd like to do the Croft. Thank you.

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INAUDIBLE

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-You know one of those devices that holds the chest open?

-What...yeah.

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-What they called?

-Chest spreader.

-Chest...?

-Spreader.

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-Chest spreader. OK.

-A set of those.

-Yeah, one of those from 1816, please.

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What is extraordinary about working on it is that you realise it's timeless -

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it will be here a long time after we're all gone

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because it swims into focus, depending on different issues,

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either in a very specific way like genetics or cloning,

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or in a very, very general way, really, about, you know,

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what man is capable of and what are the repercussions of that.

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There's little time to explain. The simple fact is, I built a man.

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-You did what?

-I built a man and succeeded in animating him.

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-You mean bringing him to life?

-Yes! Yes, bringing him to life. My...

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My creature. I brought him to life.

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I think Mary Shelley was writing - almost without appreciating it -

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a sort of creation myth for the science age.

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In many cultures, there are creation myths,

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but they always involve a deity, a cosmic power.

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Something sets the spark of life in motion and we humans come to life.

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But for the first time, Mary Shelley comes up with a creation myth

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which doesn't involve a deity, doesn't involve a cosmic power,

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it involves solely the skills of humankind.

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And that's why I think it stays with us now,

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because God doesn't play a very big part in our rationalisation

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about the world we live in and what we're going to do with it

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and the extent to which we're destroying it as we patently are.

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Mary Shelley's a very literate, highly educated

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young 18-19-year-old woman when she comes to it and the book is stuffed

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full of ideas which seem to me to remain very pertinent to us now.

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How does it feel to be in love?

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It...it...it...feels like all the life is...

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bubbling up inside me and spinning from my mouth.

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It feels like my lungs are on fire and my heart is a hammer!

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It feels like I can do anything in the world!

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The most important thing about the production, hopefully,

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is that it gives the creature a voice

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and I think a lot of people coming to it won't know the novel

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but they will know the movies, which robs him of his voice, really.

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The movies just waded in there and robbed him of his voice

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straightaway and yet that is the most extraordinary thing

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and so Nick's approach was to begin with the point of view of the creature.

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Arms flickering around, a bit of legs and then finding...

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What we've tried to do is begin with a being fresh from birth

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with no language.

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We see him acquire language, we see him acquire intellect and then

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by the end of the play, we allow him a very high level of articulacy

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and that was...really was one of the reasons that we wanted to do it,

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was because we'd never seen this creature given a voice,

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both to justify himself and to question his creator and say,

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"Why did you do this?"

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You abandoned me.

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-It speaks.

-Yes. Frankenstein.

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-It speaks!

-You know my name.

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That's the fantastic thing about this story is the relationship

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between father and son, master and slave, creature and creator.

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What's fascinating is seeing something come alive

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that's in a 30-year-old form and have to re-educate itself.

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I looked at stroke victims in recovery,

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I looked at people who'd had severe injuries both in wars or car

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crashes trying to re-educate their limbs and their bodies

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and when you see that happening, the amount of vulnerability.

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It gets tired. Yes. It gets tired.

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It's a very endearing thing to watch evolve. You really care for him.

0:26:360:26:41

-You know, there's a lot of my two-year-old in the way...

-Yes. Buster's been a big influence.

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..you know, that the creature...

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You know, it's...

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It's a blank canvas as a body but the brain works extremely fast.

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It's a fully grown brain so it's absorbing everything super quick.

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All the learning comes really quickly.

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-It's alive.

-It's alive.

-It's alive!

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Frankenstein eventually became the archetype of the mad scientist

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and what happens when science overreaches itself

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but what's interesting in the story of Frankenstein is that this

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becomes applied to the idea of creating people.

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And in some ways, that's something that could be

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seen as the ultimate unnatural act and it raises all sorts

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of quite specific questions about the status of the created

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being - whether or not, for example, Frankenstein's creature has a soul

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and what that means.

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God doesn't really figure in Frankenstein.

0:27:390:27:42

The human creates life

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and I think that's one of the reasons why it has

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so much relevance for us now, because we look at the world

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and we see what we've done to it, and we're worried and that's

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very much the position that Victor Frankenstein, the scientist, is in.

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