Browse content similar to My Astonishing Self: Gabriel Byrne on George Bernard Shaw. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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-REPORTER: -The Hertfordshire village of Ayot St Lawrence | 0:00:05 | 0:00:08 | |
mourns its friend. | 0:00:08 | 0:00:10 | |
The world mourns one of the dominating figures of our time. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
Gone from its presence but not from its mind | 0:00:13 | 0:00:16 | |
is the man of whom the Prime Minister has written, | 0:00:16 | 0:00:19 | |
"As critic, dramatist, man of letters, | 0:00:19 | 0:00:22 | |
"humourist, social revolutionary and prophet, | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
"he was our greatest entertainer and teacher." | 0:00:25 | 0:00:28 | |
So, in the box here is that wonderful puppet... | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
..of Shaw. | 0:00:39 | 0:00:41 | |
And there he is. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:51 | |
-In his famous knickerbockers. -Oh, my God, that's brilliant. | 0:00:52 | 0:00:55 | |
Wow! | 0:00:55 | 0:00:56 | |
If you have a little look at the head a bit, straight on, | 0:00:56 | 0:01:00 | |
-that's a bit better. -Oh, yeah. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:02 | |
There. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:03 | |
This probably puts how he thought about himself in some context. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:08 | |
He said, "The Greeks have Aristotle... | 0:01:08 | 0:01:11 | |
"..the Italians had Leonardo da Vinci, | 0:01:12 | 0:01:14 | |
"the English had Shakespeare | 0:01:14 | 0:01:17 | |
"and Ireland has my astonishing self." | 0:01:17 | 0:01:21 | |
THEY GIGGLE | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
Oh, ladies. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:45 | |
Well, this is a surprise. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:47 | |
Have you all come to see me, ladies and gentlemen? | 0:01:48 | 0:01:52 | |
Well... | 0:01:52 | 0:01:54 | |
I should never have expected this. | 0:01:54 | 0:01:57 | |
A few words from Mr Bernard Shaw. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:04 | |
I have always been intrigued by the work of George Bernard Shaw | 0:02:05 | 0:02:08 | |
but who was he, | 0:02:08 | 0:02:10 | |
this shy Irish playwright who conquered Britain | 0:02:10 | 0:02:12 | |
and the English-speaking world? | 0:02:12 | 0:02:14 | |
Oh, you're real good. | 0:02:14 | 0:02:15 | |
Thank you, captain. | 0:02:15 | 0:02:16 | |
A celebrity and a serious thinker who insisted we question everything. | 0:02:16 | 0:02:22 | |
-I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe. -Oh! | 0:02:22 | 0:02:26 | |
The winner of an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for Literature. | 0:02:26 | 0:02:30 | |
I suppose that I am here | 0:02:30 | 0:02:32 | |
as the next best thing to Shakespeare. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:36 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:02:36 | 0:02:37 | |
Shaw wrote about the big issues of his time and of our time - | 0:02:38 | 0:02:43 | |
poverty, war, feminism, race, fanaticism - | 0:02:43 | 0:02:46 | |
but always using charm and humour to get people's attention. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:51 | |
When I talk, at least I talk politics. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:53 | |
And he sold these big ideas by being larger than life. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:58 | |
This, ladies and gentlemen, is an exhibition of my profile. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:03 | |
How was that? | 0:03:04 | 0:03:06 | |
Shaw invented the idea of the artist as a brand. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
This shy boy from Dublin | 0:03:09 | 0:03:11 | |
became one of the world's most famous and recognisable men. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
Shall I now become the partly visible man? | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
Do you recognise the beard... | 0:03:18 | 0:03:21 | |
..or must I become a little more visible? | 0:03:22 | 0:03:25 | |
Even this exaggerated depiction here, | 0:03:25 | 0:03:29 | |
it's slightly abstract but you can see from it... | 0:03:29 | 0:03:33 | |
..that it's George Bernard Shaw. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:36 | |
But I think he would have been very happy to know | 0:03:38 | 0:03:40 | |
that at the end of the road there was, | 0:03:40 | 0:03:42 | |
as some people in Dublin call it, a Muriel, in honour of his... | 0:03:42 | 0:03:47 | |
in honour of his life. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:49 | |
Sadly, I think Shaw is underappreciated. | 0:03:50 | 0:03:53 | |
He's the forgotten man of Irish literature. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:56 | |
His birthplace in Dublin is closed to the public, | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
yet people around the city know his name but perhaps not much else. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:03 | |
So if you want to learn more about him or his big ideas, | 0:04:03 | 0:04:07 | |
you actually have to start in England. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:09 | |
He arrived aged 20 and spent three-quarters of his life there, | 0:04:09 | 0:04:13 | |
yet always felt like a foreigner. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:15 | |
When I came to London in the 1980s, | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
I understood that sense of exile myself. | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
Shaw had the outsider's ability to observe, | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
to question the way things are. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:25 | |
And long before he became famous, | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
he used to keep warm in the British Library, reading Karl Marx. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
I think it was that time that inspired the great beliefs | 0:04:32 | 0:04:36 | |
and themes of his life and work. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:38 | |
"How shall we house our poor?" | 0:04:39 | 0:04:41 | |
The Practical Politics of Socialism by George Bernard Shaw. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:47 | |
This is a record of Shaw's speaking engagements. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:53 | |
"Labour is the source of all wealth... | 0:04:55 | 0:04:58 | |
"..therefore to the labourers all wealth is due." | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
"October the 11th, 1891, | 0:05:03 | 0:05:06 | |
"Mr G. Bernard Shaw, Fabian, lecture followed by discussion." | 0:05:06 | 0:05:10 | |
"Practical communism." | 0:05:12 | 0:05:14 | |
Wow. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:15 | |
It's interesting that he, kind of, taught himself to become an orator | 0:05:16 | 0:05:21 | |
because in the early part of his lifetime | 0:05:21 | 0:05:23 | |
he was a very shy and insecure, young man | 0:05:23 | 0:05:27 | |
and he became this, kind of, spellbinding orator. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
What a great thing it would have been to go along | 0:05:32 | 0:05:34 | |
to one of these things and to hear him...to hear him speak. | 0:05:34 | 0:05:39 | |
Foolish people in easy circumstances flatter themselves | 0:05:40 | 0:05:44 | |
that there is no such thing as the class war in the British Empire, | 0:05:44 | 0:05:49 | |
where we are all far too respectable | 0:05:49 | 0:05:53 | |
to have any vulgar unpleasantness of that sort. | 0:05:53 | 0:05:57 | |
They deceive themselves. | 0:05:57 | 0:05:59 | |
We are up to the neck in the class war. | 0:05:59 | 0:06:02 | |
"The Women's Progressive Society." | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
"The London Vegetarian Society." | 0:06:08 | 0:06:11 | |
He was a vegetarian from the age of 24 and he said that at his funeral | 0:06:11 | 0:06:15 | |
instead of people coming behind his coffin, there'd be all the animals | 0:06:15 | 0:06:19 | |
that he hadn't eaten to pay tribute to him. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:22 | |
He must have been out every single night. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
You get the idea that he never went to sleep. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:31 | |
To begin with, he was very anxious about could he stand up, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:38 | |
could he speak, | 0:06:38 | 0:06:40 | |
but very quickly he found that he was, well, like a good actor. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:46 | |
He could speak extremely well. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:48 | |
It's interesting you should say that | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
because some people have defined acting as the shy man's revenge. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:54 | |
Shaw's real need to spread new ideas overcame his natural shyness. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:01 | |
He understood the power of the spoken word, | 0:07:01 | 0:07:04 | |
first on a soap box, later on a stage. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:08 | |
No more so than in Man And Superman, | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
a razor-sharp exploration of nature, sex and evolution | 0:07:12 | 0:07:16 | |
dressed up as a verbose comedy of manners. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
When I read Michael Holroyd's biography, | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
he talked about how Shaw himself honed his own speaking | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
-on street corners, pamphleteering. -Yes. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:28 | |
There's something Michael Holroyd writes about Shaw's consonants | 0:07:28 | 0:07:32 | |
could cut so strongly in a space | 0:07:32 | 0:07:35 | |
because he knew he had to communicate. | 0:07:35 | 0:07:37 | |
So I always thought, he's writing for people who really can speak | 0:07:37 | 0:07:41 | |
and really know how to phrase and lead an idea and land it. | 0:07:41 | 0:07:45 | |
We don't have that sort of writing. Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-bam-ba-bam. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:49 | |
It's exciting. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:51 | |
With a wonderful, instinctive cunning, | 0:07:52 | 0:07:54 | |
she kept silent and allowed me to glorify her. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
To mistake my own visions, thoughts and feelings for hers. | 0:07:57 | 0:08:01 | |
I found that when I had touched a woman's imagination... | 0:08:01 | 0:08:05 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:08:05 | 0:08:07 | |
..she would allow me to persuade myself that she loved me | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
but when my suit was granted, | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
she never said, "I'm happy, my love is satisfied", | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
she always said first, "At last the barriers are down", | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
and second, "When will you come again?" | 0:08:21 | 0:08:23 | |
-As Jack, you get to say mischievous, provocative things as a man. -Yeah. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:28 | |
Which is great to say in front of an audience. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:32 | |
You get to tease and provoke with wit. | 0:08:32 | 0:08:35 | |
You don't have to insult the audience | 0:08:35 | 0:08:37 | |
but it's so witty but the ideas are still provocative. | 0:08:37 | 0:08:41 | |
It's wonderfully human. | 0:08:41 | 0:08:43 | |
We live in an atmosphere of shame. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
We're ashamed of everything that's real about us. | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
Ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
of our experience, just as we're ashamed of our naked skins. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:57 | |
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:00 | |
Jack Tanner is a sort of self portrait of Shaw, | 0:09:00 | 0:09:04 | |
so he's possibly one of the most verbose... | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
In fact, that's one of the jokes of the play, that he does... | 0:09:06 | 0:09:09 | |
He comments on his own verbosity, doesn't he? | 0:09:09 | 0:09:12 | |
The last word of the play is "talking". | 0:09:12 | 0:09:14 | |
And it's about talking but it's about ideas. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:18 | |
Shaw's lifelong big idea was that inequality of any kind - | 0:09:21 | 0:09:25 | |
economic, gender or race - was neither inevitable nor acceptable. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:30 | |
He wrote that poverty was the greatest of our evils | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
and the worst of our crimes. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:38 | |
And he hated poverty because, like a lot of Dubliners, | 0:09:39 | 0:09:43 | |
he was born into it. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:45 | |
So, this was his bedroom. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
Tiny little room. | 0:09:57 | 0:09:58 | |
It's not hard to imagine him sitting here as a little boy. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
Born into what he called "shabby, genteel poverty." | 0:10:02 | 0:10:07 | |
His mother was a singer | 0:10:12 | 0:10:15 | |
and so he would have heard operas and all kinds of musicians play. | 0:10:15 | 0:10:21 | |
MUSIC: Home Sweet Home by Nellie Melba | 0:10:21 | 0:10:24 | |
So, this was his parents' room. | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
Shaw realised at the age of three | 0:10:40 | 0:10:43 | |
that his father was an alcoholic | 0:10:43 | 0:10:47 | |
and his mother, who was a woman who didn't bestow | 0:10:47 | 0:10:51 | |
any great deal of affection or love on him, | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
was involved with a music teacher called George Lee. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:58 | |
It wasn't just that the mother had supposedly taken this lover | 0:10:58 | 0:11:03 | |
but she lived with the lover and the husband in this house | 0:11:03 | 0:11:07 | |
and what a strange thing that must have been for the young boy, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
to watch his father be isolated and diminished in that way. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:18 | |
Certainly an unorthodox household arrangement. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:22 | |
You think about the early life of Shaw in Synge Street. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:32 | |
What must that have been like for him to grow up in a place like this? | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
Shaw invented the word "downstart" and I think that's one of the things | 0:11:36 | 0:11:40 | |
that gave him his human sympathy, you know. | 0:11:40 | 0:11:42 | |
He was trying to shake people to say, "Look, it is not inevitable | 0:11:42 | 0:11:46 | |
"that vast numbers of people have to lead lives | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
"that are constrained by poverty, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:51 | |
"by ignorance, by filth, by inequality. | 0:11:51 | 0:11:54 | |
"We can change it." | 0:11:54 | 0:11:56 | |
When he was a kid, his nanny would take him out walking | 0:11:56 | 0:11:59 | |
and they would walk | 0:11:59 | 0:12:01 | |
and she was probably paid buttons by his mother and father, you know, | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
and it seems clear that she used to do some prostitution on the side, | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
so he'd be taken into the horror of the Dublin slums. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
He saw this kind of poverty and he was horrified by it. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
That's what haunted him. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:15 | |
There's a kind of smell of the slums in his nostrils | 0:12:15 | 0:12:18 | |
and it's what drives him. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:21 | |
He wants the world to get away from that kind of indignity. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:25 | |
"I now confess to an episode in my boyhood | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
"formerly so repugnant to me that for 80 years | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
"I never mentioned it to any mortal creature - not even my wife." | 0:12:33 | 0:12:37 | |
We're in the centre of Model School in Dublin. | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
This is the second school that Shaw attended. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:47 | |
"I was sent to Marlborough Street | 0:12:49 | 0:12:51 | |
"and at once became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman | 0:12:51 | 0:12:55 | |
"would speak or play." | 0:12:55 | 0:12:57 | |
A sole Protestant child in a school of poor Catholic pupils. | 0:13:00 | 0:13:05 | |
He was unhappy here. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:07 | |
Very unhappy | 0:13:07 | 0:13:08 | |
I suppose he felt the shame of being an outsider | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
but he also I'm sure felt the shame of being poor. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:15 | |
And he was ashamed that he was ashamed. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:19 | |
It further reinforced in him, I think, | 0:13:19 | 0:13:22 | |
the notion that poverty was a horrible thing | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
and later on he came to question, of course, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:28 | |
why some people were poor and other people were rich, | 0:13:28 | 0:13:31 | |
which was what led him to his philosophical examination | 0:13:31 | 0:13:36 | |
of how society is put together. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:39 | |
His whole idea about education was that it's not the teacher | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
who should be doing the questioning, | 0:13:44 | 0:13:46 | |
it's the child who should be questioning the teacher. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:50 | |
It should implant in the child a love of learning, | 0:13:50 | 0:13:55 | |
to develop the ability to think for one's self, | 0:13:55 | 0:14:00 | |
to think critically, to question everything. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:03 | |
Authority, religion, precepts, tenets, propaganda. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:08 | |
Even 100 years ago, Shaw understood that you had to look for the truth, | 0:14:15 | 0:14:20 | |
not simply accept it. | 0:14:20 | 0:14:22 | |
Many people today still don't trust the so-called voices of authority | 0:14:22 | 0:14:27 | |
or the media. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:28 | |
Shaw was adamant that we had to wake up. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
To be active. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:33 | |
To question, to be aware of the world around us. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:37 | |
And awareness is the beginning of action. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
He wasn't just telling you, this is what you must think, | 0:14:43 | 0:14:46 | |
he was telling you, this is how you must think. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:48 | |
You have a right but also a duty to think for yourself | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
and not to take the orthodoxies, you know, | 0:14:51 | 0:14:53 | |
but to actually feel that you are free as a human being | 0:14:53 | 0:14:56 | |
to engage with ideas | 0:14:56 | 0:14:58 | |
and to be sceptical about things that people are telling you. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
By the age of 20, the one truth Bernard Shaw couldn't escape | 0:15:03 | 0:15:07 | |
was that Dublin was becoming too small for him. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:10 | |
Ireland is an island. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
It's an island off the coast of an island. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
There's something about living on an island that gives you a particular | 0:15:18 | 0:15:22 | |
desire to leave it, to get away from it, because it can be suffocating. | 0:15:22 | 0:15:27 | |
When I grew up in Ireland in the '50s and early '60s, | 0:15:28 | 0:15:32 | |
deep inside me there were some instinct try to prove myself | 0:15:32 | 0:15:36 | |
against something else rather than that staid, predictable, familiar, | 0:15:36 | 0:15:42 | |
grey society that I felt I was trapped in. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
When Shaw left, he didn't come back 29 years. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:49 | |
His true ambition was to become a universal artist. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:54 | |
If your spirit is adventurous, you need something more than that. | 0:15:54 | 0:15:58 | |
You need to move beyond the comforts of a small town. | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
London wasn't much better. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:08 | |
He left his feckless father behind in Dublin | 0:16:08 | 0:16:11 | |
and lived with his mother in rented rooms, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:14 | |
earning a few shillings ghost-writing music reviews | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
and failing spectacularly as a novelist. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:19 | |
In his first decade in London, | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
he reckoned he'd earned the sum total of £6. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
But on his 29th birthday, | 0:16:26 | 0:16:28 | |
wearing a brand-new suit paid for with the insurance money | 0:16:28 | 0:16:31 | |
from his father's death, George Bernard Shaw lost his virginity | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
to his mother's best friend. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:37 | |
It might sound like a Freudian nightmare | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
but it was the making of him. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:41 | |
The shy boy was replaced by a new, confident persona. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:45 | |
G.B.S. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:47 | |
He called it "the most fictitious character I have ever created". | 0:16:47 | 0:16:51 | |
Don't be deceived, ladies and gentlemen. | 0:16:52 | 0:16:55 | |
When a man is playing the simple, unaffected human being... | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
..in public he's always acting as hard as he possibly can. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:06 | |
And small blame to him, I do that sort of thing myself. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:11 | |
He realised that to get his work around, you know, | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
he had to create a persona, didn't he? | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
He had to invent G.B.S, | 0:17:17 | 0:17:19 | |
so he became this sort of conscious entertainer | 0:17:19 | 0:17:22 | |
always with an opinion on every subject | 0:17:22 | 0:17:24 | |
and I think that was a conscious effort on Shaw's part | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
to market his plays. | 0:17:27 | 0:17:29 | |
By the 1890s, this new, confident G.B.S stopped writing bad novels | 0:17:30 | 0:17:35 | |
and started to write what he called sermons - | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
plays about real social issues learned from his years | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
speaking, protesting and pamphleteering on the streets. | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
It was radical, but he really believed that serious business | 0:17:45 | 0:17:49 | |
could be conducted from the stage. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:51 | |
His first unpleasant plays dealt with the horrors | 0:17:51 | 0:17:55 | |
of slum landlordism, the social shame of divorce | 0:17:55 | 0:17:58 | |
and the grim economic realities of prostitution. | 0:17:58 | 0:18:02 | |
Victorian London was scandalised but he had their attention. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:06 | |
He was an overtly political writer. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
He knew enough about the London audience | 0:18:10 | 0:18:12 | |
to know you always had to sugar the pill with jokes | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
but it is always an appeal to our intelligence | 0:18:15 | 0:18:19 | |
and to our emotional maturity | 0:18:19 | 0:18:21 | |
to see that the world is worth arguing over. | 0:18:21 | 0:18:25 | |
He is absolutely insistent | 0:18:25 | 0:18:28 | |
that his audiences share the lives of others and ideas of others. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:33 | |
What do you want to take down what I said for? | 0:18:33 | 0:18:36 | |
You'll just show me what you wrote. | 0:18:36 | 0:18:38 | |
How do I know if you took me down right? | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
That ain't proper writing. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:45 | |
I can't read that. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:47 | |
He's reacting against a form of theatre which he despised. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:52 | |
He despised those kind of heart on sleeve Victorian melodramas | 0:18:52 | 0:18:56 | |
that were the West End staple that he was trying to sweep away. | 0:18:56 | 0:19:00 | |
He was restoring seriousness to the London theatre. | 0:19:00 | 0:19:04 | |
But that's the key thing. I think Shaw was a great demolition expert. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:08 | |
He inherits a medium that when he comes into it into the 1890s | 0:19:08 | 0:19:11 | |
is ossified, really, and is dealing in certain stock forms. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:15 | |
Stock melodramas, stock romance, stock love stories, | 0:19:15 | 0:19:19 | |
bad Shakespeare productions, obviously, | 0:19:19 | 0:19:21 | |
actor managers dominating the whole theatre. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
Shaw comes along and puts a bomb under it all, really, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
and explodes it and says, no, theatre can actually be serious, | 0:19:26 | 0:19:30 | |
it can address big issues, it can be topical | 0:19:30 | 0:19:33 | |
and it can make you think. | 0:19:33 | 0:19:35 | |
Shaw is always challenging you | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
and people don't always like that. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
I think it is good to challenge people. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
Like a Trojan horse, Shaw was prepared not just to challenge | 0:19:47 | 0:19:51 | |
but to undermine the society he lived in. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:53 | |
To show his contempt for the British class system. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:57 | |
Pygmalion, I suppose, is the perfect example, | 0:19:57 | 0:20:00 | |
where he turns a flower girl into a lady | 0:20:00 | 0:20:02 | |
just by changing the way she speaks. | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
You see this creature with her kerbstone English? | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
The English that will keep her in the gutter for the rest her days. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
Well, sir, in three months I could pass her off as a duchess | 0:20:11 | 0:20:13 | |
-at an ambassador's reception. -No, no, no. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:15 | |
Yes. I could even get her a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant, | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
-which requires better English. -You mean you could make me... | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, | 0:20:21 | 0:20:23 | |
you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
you incarnate insult to the English language... | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
Here's simultaneously entertaining, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:38 | |
theatrically appealing and... | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
complex, unresolvable, unpindownable. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:44 | |
I mean, obviously Shaw relishes ideas and a lot of his plays are | 0:20:44 | 0:20:48 | |
discussion plays, but at the same time, if you look at the plays, | 0:20:48 | 0:20:51 | |
there's an extraordinary, sort of, emotional undertone | 0:20:51 | 0:20:54 | |
and the very end of Pygmalion, what happens, Professor Higgins, | 0:20:54 | 0:20:58 | |
having sort of modelled and created this woman Eliza, | 0:20:58 | 0:21:01 | |
sees her become independent | 0:21:01 | 0:21:03 | |
and there's a wonderful, sort of, heartbreak at the end | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
when he's both rejoicing in Eliza's independence | 0:21:06 | 0:21:09 | |
and at the same time realising he's now left alone. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:13 | |
You know, he's the master who's been overtaken by his pupil. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:17 | |
You can't take away the knowledge you gave me. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
You said I had a finer ear than you | 0:21:22 | 0:21:24 | |
and I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. | 0:21:24 | 0:21:27 | |
Ah-ha, that's done you, Henry Higgins, that 'as. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
Now, I don't give that for your bullying and your big talk. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:33 | |
I shall advertise in the papers that your duchess is a flower girl | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
that you taught, and that she'll teach anyone to be a duchess | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
Victorian London took to Shaw in a big way. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:48 | |
Like Oscar Wilde, they enjoyed this Irishman's charming way | 0:21:48 | 0:21:52 | |
of tearing their world apart. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:54 | |
So after 40 years, the shy boy from Dublin found notoriety and success. | 0:21:54 | 0:22:00 | |
And with success came money | 0:22:00 | 0:22:02 | |
and with money came the financial independence to leave | 0:22:02 | 0:22:04 | |
his mother's home and to find a wife. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
At the tender age of 42, Shaw married an Irish woman, | 0:22:07 | 0:22:11 | |
Charlotte Payne-Townshend. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:13 | |
He once wrote that marriage is popular | 0:22:13 | 0:22:16 | |
because it combines the maximum of temptation | 0:22:16 | 0:22:19 | |
with the maximum of opportunity. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:21 | |
But Charlotte could never tolerate the matter of fact side of marriage | 0:22:21 | 0:22:25 | |
and it was probably never consummated. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:28 | |
But they lived contentedly for half a century in Ayot St Lawrence, | 0:22:30 | 0:22:33 | |
an hour north of London, | 0:22:33 | 0:22:35 | |
and of course it became known as Shaw's Corner. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:39 | |
And of course it was Shaw himself who left it to the National Trust. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:43 | |
This is exactly as Shaw left it. | 0:22:44 | 0:22:48 | |
It feels like he's just... | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
that he's just stepped out. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:55 | |
Ah! | 0:23:06 | 0:23:08 | |
The Oscar is a doorstop. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:12 | |
Academy Award for writing the screenplay of Pygmalion. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:18 | |
He was asked how he felt about winning the Oscar and he said... | 0:23:19 | 0:23:24 | |
"Considering the source, it's an insult." | 0:23:25 | 0:23:28 | |
Of course, he also won the Nobel Prize. | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
One of only two people to do that, the other one being Bob Dylan. | 0:23:33 | 0:23:37 | |
I had always read about Shaw's Corner and I had imagined it... | 0:23:42 | 0:23:46 | |
..but when you're here, you realise there's a stillness about this place | 0:23:47 | 0:23:52 | |
that is, erm... really powerful. | 0:23:52 | 0:23:55 | |
It feels like it's a cocoon... | 0:23:56 | 0:23:59 | |
..away from the world, though of course the world came to him here. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
I've always found it kind of interesting | 0:24:12 | 0:24:15 | |
to know where writers write, the rooms that they write it - | 0:24:15 | 0:24:19 | |
It's, erm... | 0:24:21 | 0:24:22 | |
It's a wonderful feeling to be in the same... | 0:24:24 | 0:24:29 | |
in the space as where he wrote some of his greatest work. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:34 | |
It's not too difficult to imagine him sitting here typing away. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
He didn't like to be disturbed. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:42 | |
People were always calling to the house to meet him, | 0:24:42 | 0:24:45 | |
to ask his opinion about everything | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
and sometimes they'd ask for money, sometimes he actually had stalkers. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:54 | |
And this was a place where he couldn't be found | 0:24:55 | 0:24:58 | |
and he could be distracted. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
There's a unique feature about this little... little hut. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
So it revolved with the sun. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:15 | |
He moved with the times and moved always towards the light, I think, | 0:25:16 | 0:25:22 | |
not to make too heavy a metaphor of it. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:24 | |
Shaw was always a forward-thinking man. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:30 | |
He said himself that he'd been born 50 years too early, | 0:25:30 | 0:25:33 | |
as if he were waiting for the 20th century to arrive. | 0:25:33 | 0:25:37 | |
He called himself the messenger boy for the new age. | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
I stand for the future and past, | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
for the posterity that has no vote | 0:25:46 | 0:25:48 | |
and for the tradition that never had any. | 0:25:48 | 0:25:51 | |
For intellectual integrity, | 0:25:51 | 0:25:53 | |
for humanity, | 0:25:53 | 0:25:55 | |
for the rescue of industry from commercialism | 0:25:55 | 0:25:59 | |
and of science from professionalism, | 0:25:59 | 0:26:01 | |
for all the things that you desire as sincerely as I... | 0:26:01 | 0:26:06 | |
..but which in you is held in leash by the power of the press. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:13 | |
By 1904, Shaw's plays and ideas were making an impact | 0:26:15 | 0:26:19 | |
on British social and political life. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
He helped found the Labour Party, | 0:26:22 | 0:26:24 | |
the London School of Economics and the New Statesman magazine. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:28 | |
He was a socialist and a social media sensation. | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
He began a successful residency at the Royal Court Theatre | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
on Sloane Square, where he was called the Chelsea Shakespeare. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:40 | |
Coincidentally, it's where I made my own London acting debut. | 0:26:40 | 0:26:44 | |
He began his run here by taking the piss out of the English and Irish. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:51 | |
John Bull's Other Island made Edward VII break his chair with laughter. | 0:26:51 | 0:26:56 | |
Lloyd George saw it five times and declared | 0:26:56 | 0:26:59 | |
"the cleverest man in England is an Irish man". | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
"Man alive, don't you know that all this 'top of the morning' | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
"and 'broth of a boy' and 'more power to your elbow' business | 0:27:06 | 0:27:09 | |
"is got up in England to fool you? | 0:27:09 | 0:27:11 | |
"Like the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music, | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
"no Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland or ever will." | 0:27:14 | 0:27:19 | |
Shaw was an interesting case, wasn't he, | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
because he lived in England much longer than he lived in Ireland | 0:27:21 | 0:27:24 | |
without ever relinquishing his sense of Irishness. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:27 | |
The thing about Shaw, wherever he was, he was an outsider. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:30 | |
Someone said he had the homelessness of genius | 0:27:30 | 0:27:32 | |
and I think there's some truth in that, actually. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
The English enjoy an outsider commenting on them. | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
The English are more receptive to that, I think, than the Irish are. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:44 | |
The Irish don't like outsiders commenting on them. | 0:27:44 | 0:27:48 | |
No, I don't, and certainly we get very... | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
-We're a little raw in that department. -Yes. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:52 | |
Whereas the English have a greater tradition of it. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
Shaw made people laugh and Wilde made people laugh, | 0:27:55 | 0:27:58 | |
Wogan made people laugh, Dave Allen made people... | 0:27:58 | 0:28:00 | |
and you make people laugh. | 0:28:00 | 0:28:02 | |
Is it a thing that you can make a more powerful inroad | 0:28:02 | 0:28:06 | |
if you do it through humour, or...? | 0:28:06 | 0:28:08 | |
Well, that was Shaw's take on it always. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:10 | |
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
otherwise they'll kill you. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:14 | |
They want us to take a wry look and look askance | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
because it is a comedy stance to be the intelligent alien, | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
to be slightly outside of somewhere and holding it up for examination | 0:28:20 | 0:28:25 | |
but with one eyebrow raised in a, "What I'm saying here | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
"isn't too damning, I'm just saying this is unusual." | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
Shakespeare had a mulberry tree | 0:28:32 | 0:28:34 | |
and I'm not going to be outdone by Shakespeare. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:28:37 | 0:28:39 | |
He was, as you can see there, | 0:28:39 | 0:28:41 | |
he was bearded and suited but in the machinery of the modern world, | 0:28:41 | 0:28:46 | |
I mean, that is somebody being a celebrity. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:49 | |
I am in a certain difficulty about it because it's perfectly obvious | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
to all of you that it's already planted. | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:28:55 | 0:28:56 | |
He's a complete ham, isn't he? | 0:28:58 | 0:29:01 | |
I mean, he's acting up for the crowd and the cameras | 0:29:01 | 0:29:03 | |
and he has them in the palm of his hand. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:06 | |
The comparison I draw there is to Einstein, | 0:29:06 | 0:29:08 | |
as somebody who became iconic in their field. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:11 | |
You paid for the Shakespearean forehead, so here it is again. | 0:29:11 | 0:29:15 | |
You'll notice the arrangement of my hair, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
it takes me 20 minutes every morning to get that up, you know, | 0:29:19 | 0:29:23 | |
to get it properly arranged for you to admire. | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
Another thing that strikes me, his accent. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
Yes, he's still got an Irish accent even though he left the country | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
presumably 40, 50 years before then. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:34 | |
It's Irish but there's an inflection, a slight inflection. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:38 | |
Now, are we saying that he may have cultivated that accent slightly | 0:29:38 | 0:29:42 | |
-to distinguish himself in the world he was working in? -I don't know. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:47 | |
Now, whether you are a foreigner or a native, | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
the first thing I must impress on you | 0:29:53 | 0:29:56 | |
is that there is no such thing as ideally correct English. | 0:29:56 | 0:30:01 | |
I wish I could offer you your choice among them all as a model | 0:30:02 | 0:30:06 | |
but for the moment, I am afraid you must put up with me, an Irish man. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:12 | |
Shaw said, "In Britain, I am still a foreigner and I shall die one." | 0:30:13 | 0:30:18 | |
But his wife Charlotte had family in Cork and Kerry | 0:30:18 | 0:30:21 | |
and so, as a 50-year-old man, he was going to have to face | 0:30:21 | 0:30:24 | |
the inevitable at some point and go home. | 0:30:24 | 0:30:28 | |
The dilemma that every exile faces is that... | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
once you leave the place that you're from, | 0:30:31 | 0:30:35 | |
you never belong there in quite the same way again | 0:30:35 | 0:30:38 | |
and the place that you go to, you never truly belong either. | 0:30:38 | 0:30:44 | |
And that can produce a restlessness. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:46 | |
Sometimes, what we're imagining is something that's no longer... | 0:30:46 | 0:30:51 | |
it's no longer the same. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:53 | |
I think Shaw understood that and it was 30 years before he came back. | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
When he did come back, he didn't come back to Dublin | 0:30:57 | 0:31:00 | |
where he'd been born and brought up, he came back to a place like this, | 0:31:00 | 0:31:04 | |
which has a kind of a timelessness about it. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
He was a notoriously bad driver... | 0:31:13 | 0:31:16 | |
..and Mrs Shaw insisted that when they came to Ireland | 0:31:17 | 0:31:20 | |
they would be driven. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:22 | |
What a figure he must have presented sitting in the back of... | 0:31:24 | 0:31:29 | |
this beautiful, modern machine | 0:31:29 | 0:31:34 | |
coming through the countryside at a time when there were | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
almost no cars on the road, with his white beard and his camera. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:42 | |
It must have been an amazing, amazing sight as it passed, | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
and the drama of it coming from a distance | 0:31:46 | 0:31:50 | |
and then materialising and then disappearing. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
The idea that he was driving around in Ireland in a Rolls-Royce... | 0:31:58 | 0:32:02 | |
I heard somebody say once that it shows you what a hypocrite he was. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
There he was, spouting about how everybody was equal. | 0:32:06 | 0:32:09 | |
But it reminds me of a story, apocryphal or not, | 0:32:09 | 0:32:12 | |
of Lenin coming back from Finland to lead the Russian Revolution | 0:32:12 | 0:32:16 | |
where somebody says, you're in a first-class carriage | 0:32:16 | 0:32:19 | |
and you're coming back to lead the Revolution, | 0:32:19 | 0:32:22 | |
what's up with that? | 0:32:22 | 0:32:23 | |
And he said, there should only be first-class carriages, | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
and I think Shaw would have agreed with him. | 0:32:27 | 0:32:30 | |
Probably that everybody should have their own Rolls-Royce. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:33 | |
Like his writing shed, Shaw loved the isolation of County Kerry. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:40 | |
He finished his plays Major Barbara and Saint Joan | 0:32:40 | 0:32:43 | |
on various visits here. | 0:32:43 | 0:32:45 | |
I think he found energy and inspiration from the landscape. | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
It stimulated him. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:50 | |
And when you look at his letters and photos from here, | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
you get the feeling that even though this was his native land, | 0:32:53 | 0:32:56 | |
he was still eager to explore. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
He spent two hours rowing out to the Skellig Islands | 0:32:59 | 0:33:01 | |
off the Kerry coasts. | 0:33:01 | 0:33:03 | |
He called it "the most impossible rock in the world". | 0:33:03 | 0:33:06 | |
"Part of our dream world". | 0:33:06 | 0:33:08 | |
He had a childlike sense of curiosity and adventure. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:11 | |
He went up in hot air balloons, | 0:33:11 | 0:33:13 | |
he flew over the Cape and the Great Wall of China. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:17 | |
He experimented with cameras, mechanics and naturism. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
He didn't navel gaze, he looked outwards, | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
fascinated by everything he saw | 0:33:23 | 0:33:25 | |
and questioning everything he saw as wrong. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:28 | |
Shaw wasn't afraid to bring his lifelong crusade against inequality | 0:33:28 | 0:33:33 | |
back to the city of his birth. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:35 | |
"Poverty is a crime. | 0:33:40 | 0:33:42 | |
"A crime not of the poor but of the people who allowed them to be poor. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:46 | |
"Poverty is a crime of society. | 0:33:46 | 0:33:49 | |
"A preventable crime." | 0:33:49 | 0:33:51 | |
There is an extraordinary meeting when he gives a lecture in 1910 | 0:33:54 | 0:33:59 | |
in Dublin on The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:04 | |
They give him a round of applause when he arrives | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
and he said to them straightaway, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
"I might not be able to reciprocate with some applause for yourselves", | 0:34:12 | 0:34:19 | |
as he's telling them what they might not want to hear. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:23 | |
And what's he saying, | 0:34:23 | 0:34:24 | |
"I went to the workhouse today and I saw how you're treating children | 0:34:24 | 0:34:29 | |
"in the workhouses and I'm telling you now, | 0:34:29 | 0:34:32 | |
"you're going to burn in hell | 0:34:32 | 0:34:33 | |
"for the way you're treating these children. | 0:34:33 | 0:34:35 | |
"And this is not about the Brits. | 0:34:35 | 0:34:37 | |
"This is in your control. This is your local government. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:40 | |
"This is what you're doing to Irish children right now." | 0:34:40 | 0:34:43 | |
When he was a very famous man and everybody wanted to have | 0:34:43 | 0:34:46 | |
a look at him and claim him a little bit as a Dubliner | 0:34:46 | 0:34:48 | |
and all the great and the good of Dublin society come to hear him. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:51 | |
I mean, to stand up in front of an audience | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
and to make them afraid of their souls... | 0:34:54 | 0:34:57 | |
And of course so prescient, it was so prescient. | 0:34:57 | 0:35:00 | |
He was the person who identified, before we set up the state, | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
the way we were treating children | 0:35:04 | 0:35:06 | |
was going to be the dark undercurrent of our society. | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
You know in Pygmalion where he gives Eliza, who's this kind of poor, | 0:35:10 | 0:35:15 | |
illiterate young woman off the streets, literally, | 0:35:15 | 0:35:19 | |
and he gives her that great line at end, | 0:35:19 | 0:35:22 | |
when she's become the sort of mock duchess | 0:35:22 | 0:35:24 | |
and she says, you know, "We become of the way we're treated." | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, | 0:35:28 | 0:35:33 | |
but how she's treated. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:34 | |
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:41 | |
But I know I can be a lady to you | 0:35:41 | 0:35:42 | |
because you always treat me as a lady and always will. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:46 | |
If you treat somebody like dirt, they'll become dirt. | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
If you treat them with decency and dignity, | 0:35:49 | 0:35:52 | |
they will be decent and dignified. | 0:35:52 | 0:35:54 | |
And I think that's the belief that runs through his politics, you know? | 0:35:54 | 0:35:57 | |
His politics, in a way, are very, very simple, | 0:35:57 | 0:35:59 | |
which is just that nobody should be treated like dirt. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
I dare say my mother could find some chap or other who'd do very well. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:05 | |
We were above that in Covent Garden. | 0:36:06 | 0:36:08 | |
-What do you mean? -I sold flowers. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:11 | |
I didn't sell myself. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:12 | |
Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:16 | |
Mrs Warren's Profession. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:20 | |
This amazing play, which was revolutionary for its time, | 0:36:21 | 0:36:25 | |
which is about the notion of prostitution. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
More importantly about the economic demands that make a woman | 0:36:29 | 0:36:33 | |
turn to prostitution just to educate her daughter. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:36 | |
Shaw made no moral judgments | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
but he was scathing about the harsh realities | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
of life for women in Victorian England. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:44 | |
The play was banned in London | 0:36:44 | 0:36:46 | |
and in New York the cast were arrested on stage, mid-performance. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:50 | |
He was a true champion of women | 0:36:54 | 0:36:56 | |
and believed that women were in every way | 0:36:56 | 0:37:00 | |
the equal of men and that's something that we may say, | 0:37:00 | 0:37:03 | |
"Oh, yes, well, that's obvious," but at that time when he was writing, | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
it wasn't obvious. | 0:37:06 | 0:37:08 | |
His play Saint Joan, for example, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
is about a woman who takes on the male establishment, | 0:37:11 | 0:37:14 | |
questions it and is willing to sacrifice her life | 0:37:14 | 0:37:18 | |
for her principles and for the truth. | 0:37:18 | 0:37:20 | |
I think I'm very drawn to Shaw because I think I am, as a director, | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
drawn to plays that are full of debate and full of ideas. | 0:37:24 | 0:37:29 | |
It feels at the moment like we are so polarised in politics | 0:37:29 | 0:37:32 | |
that we can't understand the other's view. | 0:37:32 | 0:37:35 | |
Now, that's incredibly painful at a point where you've got Trump | 0:37:35 | 0:37:38 | |
in America and you've got Brexit here, you know, | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
one's natural instinct is not to look at the other perspective. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:42 | |
You've not many friends at court. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
Why do all these nights and courtiers and churchmen hate me? | 0:37:45 | 0:37:48 | |
Simpleton. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:51 | |
Do you expect stupid people to love you for showing them up? | 0:37:51 | 0:37:54 | |
In terms of the depictions of women in theatre, | 0:37:56 | 0:38:01 | |
-she's a very strong and powerful character. -Yes. | 0:38:01 | 0:38:04 | |
It's one of the great roles for women | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
because it's so difficult to play and epic and complex. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:11 | |
What I love about Joan is that she sees herself | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
as a soldier and so she's not a woman or a man. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:18 | |
I really believe that she sees herself in that way | 0:38:18 | 0:38:21 | |
and that's sort of a post-feminist thing, | 0:38:21 | 0:38:25 | |
that I hope one day we manage to achieve, where it doesn't | 0:38:25 | 0:38:28 | |
really matter what sex you are, you can just do something. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
I think he is fascinated by women as the outrageous voice | 0:38:31 | 0:38:36 | |
and the challenging voice. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
It feels like it's written by a woman for a woman as opposed to | 0:38:39 | 0:38:42 | |
-a man for a woman. -Yeah, and even I feel it from the audience, | 0:38:42 | 0:38:46 | |
sometimes they don't like Joan because she's so full of pride | 0:38:46 | 0:38:51 | |
and conviction and that's not very feminine, is it? | 0:38:51 | 0:38:54 | |
Light your fires! | 0:38:56 | 0:38:57 | |
Do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? | 0:38:58 | 0:39:02 | |
My voices were right. | 0:39:04 | 0:39:06 | |
-Joan, Joan! -Yes! | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
He didn't just put women on the stage in great roles. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:10 | |
Many of those great roles were supported | 0:39:10 | 0:39:12 | |
and inspired by women that he knew. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:14 | |
He was really supportive of women and he supported women | 0:39:14 | 0:39:18 | |
who otherwise people would see as troublemakers. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:21 | |
That was what really impressed him about the suffragettes. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:24 | |
You know, people saying you're completely crazy and he's like, | 0:39:24 | 0:39:27 | |
"Well, no, they're not crazy. They are actually going to do this | 0:39:27 | 0:39:30 | |
"and they sound like hooligans." | 0:39:30 | 0:39:32 | |
What was it Emmeline Pankhurst said? | 0:39:32 | 0:39:34 | |
"I am what you would call a hooligan." | 0:39:34 | 0:39:36 | |
But hey, you know, I sit here talking to you | 0:39:36 | 0:39:40 | |
and I do have the vote and the right to education | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
and many of the things that were imagined to the impossible. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:48 | |
How about you listed Shaw | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
as one of the "top ten" feminists of the century? | 0:39:50 | 0:39:55 | |
Why do you say that? | 0:39:55 | 0:39:57 | |
Because... | 0:39:57 | 0:39:58 | |
Because he had enormous influence and he didn't just write journalism, | 0:39:58 | 0:40:03 | |
he turned up at meetings, he promoted people, | 0:40:03 | 0:40:06 | |
he went to rallies, he shouted. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:08 | |
But not only that, but he actually was doing that decades before | 0:40:08 | 0:40:12 | |
with his friends in the socialist movement, like Eleanor Marx. | 0:40:12 | 0:40:16 | |
Saying, "If we have socialism on the agenda, | 0:40:16 | 0:40:19 | |
"if we're looking at equality, then this journey, part of this journey, | 0:40:19 | 0:40:22 | |
"is also the inequality between people, | 0:40:22 | 0:40:24 | |
"between humans and between men and women as well." | 0:40:24 | 0:40:29 | |
-He would have said that women's rights were human rights. -Yeah. | 0:40:29 | 0:40:32 | |
I think Shaw was a truly brave man, | 0:40:34 | 0:40:36 | |
always prepared to risk unpopularity or outrage. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
At the beginning of World War I, his closest friends ostracised him. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:44 | |
One called him "a complete bastard" | 0:40:44 | 0:40:47 | |
and there were calls for him to be shot as a traitor. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:50 | |
But Shaw couldn't stay quiet about the propaganda, | 0:40:50 | 0:40:54 | |
the jingoism, about the greed of the arms trade or the sheer futility of | 0:40:54 | 0:40:59 | |
war, where the only winner was war itself. | 0:40:59 | 0:41:02 | |
In 1914, | 0:41:03 | 0:41:06 | |
I was as sorry for the young Germans who lay slain or mutilated | 0:41:06 | 0:41:11 | |
in no man's land as for the British lads who lay beside them. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:16 | |
War is to me a sheer waste of life. | 0:41:16 | 0:41:21 | |
Sadly, I think Shaw could have written these words yesterday. | 0:41:22 | 0:41:26 | |
I have visions of streets heaped with mangled corpses | 0:41:28 | 0:41:32 | |
in which children wander, crying for their parents, | 0:41:32 | 0:41:37 | |
and babies grasp and strangle in the clutches of dead mothers. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:42 | |
I dislike war, | 0:41:44 | 0:41:46 | |
not only for its dangers and inconveniences, | 0:41:46 | 0:41:50 | |
but because of the loss of so many young men, | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
any of whom may be a Newton or an Einstein, a Beethoven, | 0:41:54 | 0:41:59 | |
a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare or even a Shaw. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:03 | |
It wasn't easy to be that kind of commentator. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:10 | |
It required real bravery and courage, don't you think? | 0:42:10 | 0:42:15 | |
I've no doubt that Shaw | 0:42:15 | 0:42:16 | |
was exceptionally brave and courageous. | 0:42:16 | 0:42:21 | |
It would have been easier for him to stay silent | 0:42:21 | 0:42:24 | |
about a lot of burning issues | 0:42:24 | 0:42:26 | |
in domestic and international politics | 0:42:26 | 0:42:29 | |
and controversies at that time. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:31 | |
Take the First World War - he could have decided that he was going | 0:42:31 | 0:42:36 | |
to be relatively quiet about that but he explodes about it. | 0:42:36 | 0:42:40 | |
There are various issues in relation to what's going on in Ireland | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
that he could have been relatively quiet about | 0:42:44 | 0:42:46 | |
but he's not going to stay silent about what he sees as the excesses, | 0:42:46 | 0:42:51 | |
the mistakes of British rule in Ireland. | 0:42:51 | 0:42:53 | |
You've got to remember that in the middle of Ireland's struggle | 0:42:55 | 0:42:59 | |
for independence, which came to a head in the 1916 rising, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
Shaw was one of the few Irish voices that Britain might listen to. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:07 | |
And so he offered his support to a man on trial in London for his life. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:12 | |
Sir Roger Casement was a highly respected diplomat | 0:43:12 | 0:43:15 | |
and knight of the realm | 0:43:15 | 0:43:16 | |
but also an Irish Republican and a gun-runner. | 0:43:16 | 0:43:20 | |
Roger Casement was a really interesting character. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:23 | |
Protestant from the North of Ireland | 0:43:23 | 0:43:25 | |
who was knighted by the British establishment | 0:43:25 | 0:43:28 | |
for his work in the Congo. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
Somewhat later, then, | 0:43:31 | 0:43:33 | |
he was caught importing arms into Ireland | 0:43:33 | 0:43:36 | |
for the Irish revolution and he went from being an establishment hero | 0:43:36 | 0:43:42 | |
to being a villain. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:43 | |
And Shaw came to his defence and for Shaw | 0:43:43 | 0:43:47 | |
the courtroom was a theatre | 0:43:47 | 0:43:51 | |
and he wanted Casement to defend himself | 0:43:51 | 0:43:56 | |
by reciting a defence that | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
would be written specifically by Shaw | 0:43:59 | 0:44:04 | |
as a piece of theatre | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
in which he would get the jury to think about why they were trying him | 0:44:07 | 0:44:13 | |
and to appeal to their sense - | 0:44:13 | 0:44:15 | |
in a weird way it's a Shavian kind of paradox - | 0:44:15 | 0:44:18 | |
to appeal to their sense of what was right. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:22 | |
"If you persist in treating me as an Englishman, | 0:44:23 | 0:44:27 | |
"you bind yourself thereby | 0:44:27 | 0:44:28 | |
"to hang me as a traitor before the eyes of the world. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:32 | |
"Now, as a simple matter of fact | 0:44:32 | 0:44:34 | |
"I am neither an English man nor a traitor. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:37 | |
"I am an Irish man captured in a fair attempt to achieve | 0:44:37 | 0:44:41 | |
"the independence of my country." | 0:44:41 | 0:44:44 | |
Unfortunately, Casement was talked out of that defence by his counsel | 0:44:50 | 0:44:56 | |
and as a matter of fact he was found guilty and he was hanged. | 0:44:56 | 0:45:01 | |
It wasn't just Casement. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:05 | |
I mean, Shaw, in relation to the Irish revolution in 1916, | 0:45:05 | 0:45:11 | |
he tried to prevail upon the British government from executing those men | 0:45:11 | 0:45:16 | |
by saying that if you execute them, | 0:45:16 | 0:45:18 | |
you'll turn them into martyrs | 0:45:18 | 0:45:20 | |
and he was also aware of this with Roger Casement because | 0:45:20 | 0:45:25 | |
Casement did become a martyr and those men of 1916 who were executed | 0:45:25 | 0:45:30 | |
summarily by the British government also became martyrs | 0:45:30 | 0:45:34 | |
and he thought that that was a huge mistake. | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
But he had a tremendous capacity to see the bigger picture. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:40 | |
He has developed this way of engaging with the world | 0:45:46 | 0:45:52 | |
that involves him speaking out, writing. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:55 | |
It's also feeding his ego. | 0:45:55 | 0:45:57 | |
There's a reason why Shaw becomes so iconic and part of it is ego. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:03 | |
I don't think he could help himself. | 0:46:03 | 0:46:05 | |
There has been one very important omission | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
in the proceedings today. | 0:46:08 | 0:46:10 | |
I simply ask you | 0:46:11 | 0:46:13 | |
to drink the health | 0:46:13 | 0:46:16 | |
of Mr Bernard Shaw. | 0:46:16 | 0:46:17 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
He is Doctor Frankenstein, you know, | 0:46:19 | 0:46:21 | |
he creates GBS and it's a very self-conscious, | 0:46:21 | 0:46:25 | |
thought-through way of projecting himself. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
So now take a good look at me | 0:46:28 | 0:46:30 | |
because I am the actual, real and original Bernard Shaw. | 0:46:30 | 0:46:34 | |
-NEWSREEL: -When the Irish dramatist came back to Southampton on the Arandora Star, | 0:46:34 | 0:46:37 | |
he favoured British news with one of his most meaty interviews. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
Perhaps the vanity of Shaw | 0:46:40 | 0:46:42 | |
allowed him to square a lot of his own circles. | 0:46:42 | 0:46:45 | |
As a young campaigner, | 0:46:46 | 0:46:48 | |
Shaw had been committed to gradual social change. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
But as an old man in his 70s and running out of years, | 0:46:51 | 0:46:54 | |
he was getting frustrated. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:56 | |
He felt democratic change was just too slow. | 0:46:56 | 0:46:59 | |
In the 1930s, he certainly wasn't alone in thinking that a short, | 0:46:59 | 0:47:03 | |
sharp shock in the form of a Stalin, | 0:47:03 | 0:47:06 | |
Mussolini or Hitler might save socialism | 0:47:06 | 0:47:10 | |
and save the world. And when Shaw spoke, the world listened. | 0:47:10 | 0:47:14 | |
The great majority of the human race are easy-going, | 0:47:16 | 0:47:19 | |
sensible people and left to themselves, | 0:47:19 | 0:47:22 | |
they look round for somebody who looks intelligent | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
and they say, "Tell us what to do." | 0:47:25 | 0:47:27 | |
You can't get anything done without a dictatorship. | 0:47:27 | 0:47:30 | |
I think in justice to Signor Mussolini, | 0:47:30 | 0:47:33 | |
I ought to tell you that he has a very wonderful head. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:39 | |
He has a wonderful brow, which comes down to here. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:42 | |
Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he, | 0:47:47 | 0:47:52 | |
knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight, | 0:47:52 | 0:47:57 | |
he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles. | 0:47:57 | 0:48:00 | |
So far as Hitler and Second World War is concerned, | 0:48:01 | 0:48:07 | |
he said at the end of the first war, | 0:48:07 | 0:48:09 | |
"What you are doing is going to create | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
"another world war while I'm still alive. | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
"To say that they are the enemy of people, of human beings, | 0:48:15 | 0:48:19 | |
"they will look in and make somebody else the enemy, | 0:48:19 | 0:48:24 | |
"rather than themselves." | 0:48:24 | 0:48:26 | |
This is the interesting thing about Shaw's longevity. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:29 | |
He was there during this period in the 19th century of a nationalism | 0:48:29 | 0:48:34 | |
that ultimately results in the First World War. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:37 | |
He has an awful lot to say about international conflict, | 0:48:37 | 0:48:40 | |
about the dangers of nationalism and patriotism and xenophobia and there, | 0:48:40 | 0:48:46 | |
in the 1920s and 1930s, he's still there observing the new regimes, | 0:48:46 | 0:48:51 | |
the new orders, the questioning of democracy. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:54 | |
The real thing, you cannot get responsibility without dictatorship. | 0:48:54 | 0:48:59 | |
What you've got to do | 0:48:59 | 0:49:00 | |
is to make your dictator really responsible so that | 0:49:00 | 0:49:02 | |
when he abuses his powers or doesn't do the job, you can get rid of him. | 0:49:02 | 0:49:07 | |
That's... Everything that is done, has to be done, | 0:49:07 | 0:49:09 | |
somebody's got to dictate it. | 0:49:09 | 0:49:11 | |
His thinking starts to change | 0:49:14 | 0:49:16 | |
but that takes him into some kind of dark areas through his support | 0:49:16 | 0:49:21 | |
of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:24 | |
What do you make of that swerve into territory that a lot of people | 0:49:24 | 0:49:28 | |
found very hard to reconcile with the earlier Shaw? | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
He was deeply wrong about Hitler, he was deeply wrong about Mussolini. | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
He doesn't have the humility to turn around and say, | 0:49:34 | 0:49:37 | |
"You know what? I was wrong about that." | 0:49:37 | 0:49:38 | |
Actually, he shouldn't be spared the opprobrium of it. | 0:49:38 | 0:49:41 | |
But I think it shouldn't be used to sort of take away everything | 0:49:41 | 0:49:44 | |
that goes before that, you know? | 0:49:44 | 0:49:46 | |
In the end, for all the dark parts of him, | 0:49:46 | 0:49:50 | |
he did more than almost any modern individual | 0:49:50 | 0:49:54 | |
to try to uphold the ideas that everybody could be dignified | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
and that they could be dignified by their mind, | 0:49:58 | 0:50:02 | |
by having the power to think as independent individuals. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:06 | |
And what did you come to see? | 0:50:09 | 0:50:10 | |
An old man... | 0:50:13 | 0:50:15 | |
who was once a famous playwright. | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
Who talked about everything on Earth | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
and wrote about it. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:26 | |
Well, here's what is left of him. | 0:50:27 | 0:50:31 | |
Not much to look at, is it? | 0:50:32 | 0:50:36 | |
What drove him to have this need to communicate constantly, | 0:50:36 | 0:50:41 | |
to be speaking, to be writing, to be commentating? | 0:50:41 | 0:50:44 | |
When you're around these pages that he touched, | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
there's a sense of him being present and at the same time unreachable. | 0:50:53 | 0:50:58 | |
It kind of leaves you with a sense | 0:51:01 | 0:51:02 | |
of really wishing you could meet him. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:04 | |
Now, I wish that the Movietone could bring you | 0:51:07 | 0:51:12 | |
not only this picture of me | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
but I wish it could bring you the fresh air | 0:51:16 | 0:51:18 | |
that I'm breathing at present. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:20 | |
I think that all that I can do is to end as I have begun, | 0:51:25 | 0:51:30 | |
to beat the drum in front of my own booth, | 0:51:30 | 0:51:33 | |
to ask you to walk up and to see all those old, old, | 0:51:33 | 0:51:37 | |
old plays of mine that now appear to be so new, new, new. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:41 | |
His plays and the musical version of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, | 0:51:48 | 0:51:52 | |
have been a source of great bounty since his death. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
Three institutions, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, | 0:51:55 | 0:51:58 | |
the British Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland, | 0:51:58 | 0:52:02 | |
all get about £200,000 a year from the royalties he left them. | 0:52:02 | 0:52:06 | |
It's a wonderful gift to the people of Dublin | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
that this bequest continues year after year | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
to buy and curate paintings. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:17 | |
It's a mark of the man. He really believed in accessibility, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:22 | |
that people should have free access to art because he believed | 0:52:22 | 0:52:26 | |
in the power of art to change the way people think. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:29 | |
He also understood that art for many people was an elitist preoccupation, | 0:52:31 | 0:52:37 | |
that it was only people who were wealthy, | 0:52:37 | 0:52:39 | |
who had access to this kind of work and he was extremely aware | 0:52:39 | 0:52:44 | |
that art belonged to everybody. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
How do you think he might have developed had he not left Ireland? | 0:52:50 | 0:52:53 | |
Do you think it would have hampered him | 0:52:53 | 0:52:56 | |
or would he have become Shaw anyway? | 0:52:56 | 0:52:58 | |
Oh, he would have become Shaw anyway because, in a way, | 0:52:58 | 0:53:02 | |
he needs a nest | 0:53:02 | 0:53:05 | |
in which to become the cuckoo, you know? | 0:53:05 | 0:53:09 | |
And he does that with British society. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:11 | |
I think we probably should have given him greater recognition. | 0:53:11 | 0:53:15 | |
We here in Ireland owe him a great deal. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
What's he saying to us? | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
Well, I think what he would say here is the importance of education. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:28 | |
The importance of rejecting powerfully the suggestion | 0:53:28 | 0:53:32 | |
that there are matters over which | 0:53:32 | 0:53:35 | |
ordinary citizens cannot exercise control. | 0:53:35 | 0:53:39 | |
Everything in Shaw very much is about the endless capacities | 0:53:39 | 0:53:43 | |
of people who actually put the work in | 0:53:43 | 0:53:46 | |
in relation to thinking and sharing and taking | 0:53:46 | 0:53:49 | |
the vulnerability of the other into account. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
What I would call the necessary grace of discourse. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:56 | |
When he died, each of the places to which he left his royalties | 0:54:01 | 0:54:05 | |
were given one additional memento. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:07 | |
When you think of | 0:54:41 | 0:54:44 | |
the mind of this man and the influence that he had, | 0:54:44 | 0:54:48 | |
there's something very touching about it being... | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
About being stilled. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:54 | |
Small ears. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:02 | |
He wrote about his ears and said, you know, | 0:55:05 | 0:55:07 | |
that he didn't like his ears so much | 0:55:07 | 0:55:09 | |
but they're actually quite neat little ears. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:11 | |
And the way to have a happy life | 0:55:39 | 0:55:40 | |
is to be too busy doing what you like... | 0:55:40 | 0:55:42 | |
..all the time. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
Having no time left to you | 0:55:48 | 0:55:50 | |
to consider whether you're happy or not and... | 0:55:50 | 0:55:54 | |
Oh, look here, I'm getting talking. | 0:55:55 | 0:55:59 | |
I must stop. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:00 | |
Shaw, he wasn't Irish, he wasn't English. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:15 | |
He was always an outsider to the end of his life and, in the end, | 0:56:15 | 0:56:22 | |
as a husband, he chose to be buried with his wife. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:25 | |
Charlotte died five years before he did, | 0:56:25 | 0:56:28 | |
five or six years before he did, | 0:56:28 | 0:56:30 | |
and although he had expressed the desire at one stage to be buried | 0:56:30 | 0:56:36 | |
in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, | 0:56:36 | 0:56:39 | |
he changed his mind and he... | 0:56:39 | 0:56:41 | |
He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium, like Charlotte was, | 0:56:44 | 0:56:49 | |
and their ashes were mixed around this hut. | 0:56:49 | 0:56:52 | |
It's a beautiful... It's a beautiful thing to do at the end of a life. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:59 | |
My abiding sense of the man is of compassion, humanity and courage. | 0:57:01 | 0:57:08 | |
A life spent seeking and speaking the truth and damn the consequences. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:13 | |
As he said, "My life belongs to the community | 0:57:15 | 0:57:19 | |
"and, as long as I live, | 0:57:19 | 0:57:20 | |
"it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. | 0:57:20 | 0:57:23 | |
"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
"Life is no brief candle to me. | 0:57:28 | 0:57:30 | |
"It is a sort of splendid torch | 0:57:30 | 0:57:32 | |
"and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible | 0:57:32 | 0:57:36 | |
"before handing it on to the future generations." | 0:57:36 | 0:57:39 | |
They are making me a signal by which I understand | 0:57:41 | 0:57:44 | |
that they have had about enough of me. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:46 | |
I am very reluctant to leave you, ladies and gentlemen, but, | 0:57:46 | 0:57:50 | |
you see, they can cut me off at any moment. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:53 | |
To save myself from that humiliation, | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
I must bid you good morning. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 |