Thelma Holt

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a theatre producer. As a child in Lancashire, she wanted to be a priest. They had the prettiest frocks and all the best lines, she says, but opted instead for becoming an actress. She admits to being bloody awful and caused a sensation by playing Lady Macbeth without any clothes on. In the late 70s, she ran the Roundhouse in London, cleaned it up and made it solvent. From there, she went to the National Theatre, where she revitalised its overseas tours and brought some highly acclaimed foreign productions. For the past seven years, she's run her own company, enjoying such successes as The Three Sisters with The Three Redgraves and A Doll's House with Janet McTeer. Next year, she becomes the Cameron Macintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford. Her job, she says, requires a skin as thick as a rhinoceros and the morals of an alley cat. She is Thelma Holt. That's to say the job of a theatre producer, not the Oxford Professorship, I think that says,

Presenter1:26

I can understand the thick skin. Where do the feline morals come in, Thelma? Well, I'm afraid, like any other profession, ours does have its rather quaint members, and you have to be able to go out on the market place and fight a battle that you wouldn't perhaps

Presenter1:43

So you've got to cajole, you've got to persuade.

Presenter1:47

Are we talking about persuading actors to be in plays or are we persuading backers to part with their money? Bit of both. You have to persuade backers of course, but you also have to deal with landlords if you're going into a theatre. You have to deal with contractual matters and budgetary things and who you're spending your money on. Actors I exclude from that. I don't have any problem with actors. None at all. But you've got to raise this money. At the same time, putting your money in the theatre is perhaps not always the safest place to put it. You really need people who are going to do it for love as much as for money, don't you? Yes, I think that if you back plays, you must be prepared not to think you can study form and make sure it's safe, because it isn't. You have to be prepared to lose your money. And I think most people who invest in the theatre are prepared to lose their money.

Thelma Holt2:09

Down it

Thelma Holt2:11

The race

Thelma Holt2:20

Yeah.

Presenter2:34

When we have made money, of course.

Presenter2:36

You make quite a lot in a short time. I mean, the investment may last six or twelve months, and you can double your money. So they forgive you if they get their money back in a very small amount of time. So with the Three Sisters, I mean, you made a lot of money, didn't you? The Three Sisters made money, yes, and it's fortunate that it did, because I mortgaged my house for that. Did you? Yeah, but I got it back. It was okay. So it has to be an iris an idea that is irresistible to you. It must be irresistible. And it must be, uh and this has nothing to do with the fact that I'm in

Thelma Holt2:46

So

Thelma Holt2:48

Two three sisters

Presenter3:03

At it for a long time, or I'm no longer a girl. It must be in your head if this is the very last thing I do.

Presenter3:11

Do I want it to bid? Do I want the am I proud of it? And I have been terribly lucky. I've been very privileged. But you've had a lot of people. You've you've cajoled and persuaded a lot of people down here, including, I think, Robert Maxwell.

Speaker 23:12

Yeah.

Thelma Holt3:12

By walk

Presenter3:23

Yes, indeed. Robert Maxwell was my treasurer for eight years. All around us. By all accounts, you gave as good as you got, which is why you got on with him. We fought rather violently. How badly? I mean, what bad badly? Pretty bad thing. What kind of thing would happen? Well, he screamed at me when we had a a bomber threat, and I shrieked down the telephone, don't shout at me.

Thelma Holt3:27

And

Thelma Holt3:36

Badly, I mean what's the problem?

Presenter3:51

You check spiv.

Presenter3:53

And um somebody came into the office and said, You'll now be fired and indeed, a couple of hours later my chairman, an expert, rang me and said, Bob's been on the telephone, and he doesn't mind most of what you said, but he does take exception and wants to have explained the word spiv.

Presenter4:08

And I said, that is because Bob tells me every time I see him that the last five minutes of his time which he's given me has cost so many million, because he's so incredibly rich. Why does he wear plastic shoes?

Presenter4:20

When Bob came to the opening night of the Rust Rustavelli about three weeks later, he pointed at his shoes and said, Is this better? and he got a pair of rather decent churchy shoes. I liked that. I mean, one should tell some good stories about these folk, because like the curate said, he was you know, he was good and bad in parts, and one only hears the bad these days.

Speaker 24:38

He's dead.

Presenter4:39

Tell me about your first record. Well, I don't quite know why, but whenever I'm in trouble, which is very often, I always, always hum the Ode to Joy, and everybody always says, Can you hear it? She's humming the Ode to Joy, put your flack jacket on.

Presenter5:52

The final part of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, Ode to Joy, with the Sing Ferein der Gesellschaft des Musik Freunde and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karian. Get you up and moving on your desert island, Thelma. Um you really made your mark at the National Theatre, as I said in the introduction, under Peter Hall, by organising some very ambitious um

Presenter6:12

Seasons of Foreign Productions Strindberg's Miss Julie and the Vernacular Productions in Japanese, German, Russian.

Presenter6:18

Did you organise simultaneous translation for them? No, not for any of them. I don't like it. I was very, very fortunate in the international seasons because it wasn't part of my job.

Presenter6:28

I was in charge of touring and all the outside exploitation, the stuff that came across the river and had a commercial life.

Presenter6:35

And I was on a plane going to Scotland with Peter, and Peter said, Are you happy? and I said, Very. I'm having a good time. I'd only been there about nine months.

Thelma Holt6:40

Very?

Presenter6:43

And he said, I think you may get a little bored. You should have something to excite you. Why don't you do an international season? That is typical Peter Hall. He always senses long before anybody actually has a a feeling they can identify that it's coming on.

Presenter6:59

I'd had a lot of experience of foreign work which hadn't been so noticed. I mean in the early days of the open space, and this is well than truly forgotten, we had people like the Theatre of the Ridiculous, Charles Ludlam. We brought foreign things. You didn't like simultaneous transformations. I hated it. You didn't have then sur titles which you brought in the title of the title. No, hated that.

Thelma Holt7:11

Uh

Thelma Holt7:12

Well hated it.

Thelma Holt7:16

No, hey that too f-

Presenter7:18

Just explain to me why an English audience should go and watch a play in a foreign language that they can't speak.

Presenter7:24

I believe that if you have something spluttering into your ear, you don't hear the voice. Now to hear Chekhov in Russian is pretty staggering. I'd rather not hear an English voice telling me what it's about. In Bergman's Hamlet, to hear those words in that extraordinarily difficult language, I found very exciting, and so do a lot of other people. If you know the play already. Well, and I know the play quite well. I am actually admitting, very difficult for me, that I am prepared. I've been persuaded by Charles Spencer to consider doing something else and actually having not the simultaneous translation, because that's a nightmare and an intrusion, but to have surtitles. And I have said to Charlie, if the play is a new one and very difficult, I will do it, but I will not do it the way it's done in this country. I will not do it by having somebody very clever with the language translate the play and then the surtitles being put together. I would want to go one step further. When they've been put together, I wish to give them to an actor and let the actor rewrite them. And I'm prepared to do that once, and I will do it on the next difficult one I do. It will not be the next one I'm doing that's fine, because the next one I'm doing is indeed Hamlet, and that's not necessary. But I'm prepared to do it once. What language are you doing this Hamlet in? Japanese.

Presenter8:43

Tell me about your next record, number two.

Presenter8:45

Well, my next record is just a very happy memory, and I'd like to have this on my island. It's Vivaldi's Four Seasons. When Pablo Picasso celebrated his ninetieth birthday, Sir Roland Penrose, who was a great

Presenter9:00

a personal friend of his.

Presenter9:02

came to the open space and said, We want I want to give him a birthday present and he wanted a play and uh the play was called Four Little Girls. Picasso wrote two plays, one um during the occupation uh of Paris called Desire Caught by the Tail, wh wh which is a a bitter and angry play, and then afterwards a kind of celebration when he went back to Entibes at the end of the war, and it's Four Little Girls in a Kitchen Garden.

Presenter9:29

And we did it for his birthday present. And I don't know what Picasso thought we were, but we were this little basement in Tottenham Court Road, and at the end I sent him a cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds.

Presenter9:40

And it that was the returns on the show. And it came back with a very, very short little letter in long hand just saying, um, I enclose your cheque. I feel your need may be greater than mine. Pablo Picasso

Presenter9:54

And it was greater than his.

Presenter10:57

Simon Preston and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields playing part of the third of Vivaldi's four seasons, Autumn, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner, which was the music played in the open space production of Four Little Girls. So tell me, Thelmerholt, about wanting to be a priest.

Presenter11:11

When I was small, I was very affected by going to Mass and my family are Catholic.

Presenter11:19

And I loved it, and I like the smell. Incense is great. And the frock is lovely. And of course I was not being a religious at that time, so I never wanted to be a nun. But I just thought this was rather good, a big audience, everything. You used to perform burial ceremonies, perhaps. Yes, I did, because that is a very, very um

Thelma Holt11:30

The audio

Presenter11:36

theatrical event, and I used a shoe box. I remember it well, but I was very, very small, and in the shoe box would be any doll I didn't want. But my mother

Presenter11:48

asked what I was burying because I obviously was never sad about performing this ceremony, and I had decided that the body in the box was my sister. And it's the one one of the few very clear memories I have that my father found that extremely funny, my mother did not.

Thelma Holt12:02

Mother died.

Presenter12:04

And your father died he was killed in the 19th century. So how old were you? I was born in 1932.

Thelma Holt12:06

In 41 days.

Thelma Holt12:09

Yeah.

Presenter12:11

You were packed off to Baudlinisky. Yes, I was packed off to St Anne's in Lancashire where I had a really

Thelma Holt12:15

Uh

Presenter12:18

wonderful teacher called Joan Knight, who died last year, and she became a director. She was a producer and she worked in Scotland and was was very I mean, I didn't realize that as a schoolgirl, but she was the one that encouraged me.

Presenter12:33

to become an actress. My mother was not thrilled with that, not opposed to it, but not thrilled because obviously I was going to have to earn a living. We were not a moneyed family.

Presenter12:42

And um my mother wanted me to go to university and to have a trade of some sort. And Joan Knight said, It must be clear to you that there is no alternative for her whatsoever. It's clear what she's going to have to do and I went to Rada. It was a fait accompli. Next record.

Presenter13:00

When I was small I was always, always sung to sleep by my ma.

Presenter13:05

With Alice Bluegown.

Presenter13:08

On Saturday nights into Sunday mornings it is my misfortune to be travelling normally, because we tour a lot, and there's always a stage in the drive home at which I say it's time for Alice Blue Grown, and there's a great groan, and I keep people awake by singing that.

Speaker 413:25

In my sweet little early flu gown, when I first warned the darling to touch, I would forgone and shine as I felt every eye, but in every shop window

Speaker 413:46

Hi for him.

Presenter13:51

Jeanette MacDonald singing Alice Blue Gown from the musical Irene, and that was recorded in 1936.

Presenter13:58

So it was nineteen fifty, Thelmiholt. You were eighteen. You came to London to Rada to fulfil your ambition to become an actress. Who else was there? Who were your contemporaries? Iain Bannon, of course. Um, Peter O'Toole, Below me.

Presenter14:11

David Conville, who became a very successful very successful producer, and my first husband, Patrick Grauka. But you obviously did very well and for a couple of years. Yes, I did. The next ten years you you earned a living, isn't it? What sort of parts did you get?

Thelma Holt14:20

Yes I did.

Thelma Holt14:22

Do you

Thelma Holt14:24

Isn't that good?

Presenter14:26

I did do, and everybody tends to forget this and I'm thrilled about it. I did two episodes of Zed Victor One, but I wasn't Zed Victor, I was some kind of victim in it. Zed Cameron. Yeah. But I wanted to do Zed Victor One. I wanted to be the voice that said Zed Victor One, and I never got that kind of trance, but I did a couple of those. But I did a bit of television, but the real thing that worked for me, which was wonderful, and influenced the rest of my career.

Thelma Holt14:37

Azi

Presenter14:52

was that I got an HM tenant contract. So when I left Radha for the first year I was employed. When did you do Lady Macbeth in the news? Oh, that was much later. I was in Hampstead doing a show called He Who Gets Slapped.

Presenter15:07

Which was a beautiful play with Vadik Schaebel. And I met Charles Marowitz and I was offered Gertrude, which I turned down rather rapidly, and so I thought I was a bit young for it. And then I discovered that Hamlet was only eight years younger than I was, and that it was going to be a cut-up. And I did the Hamlet with Charlie. And I went on and then joined Charles. Charles wanted to build a theatre, I wanted to build a theatre, and we did the open space in Tottenham Court Road. He was an American. He was an American, GI Bill of Rights he'd come here with.

Presenter15:40

That was at a time when the American influence was enormously successful in our theatre. But he suggested you should take your clothes off to be Lady Macbeth. Yes, he did. Yes, he did. There was a great scene with Mary Whitehouse, who subsequently I got on very well with. I did a David Frost programme and Mrs Whitehouse said you should be ashamed of yourself taking all your clothes off and titillating people. And I said that is absolutely absurd because at the time I was not at all well endowed. I was a skinny little thing, not like now. And ten minutes away in Soho you could spend the whole evening being titillated, whereas here you had to sit through nearly an hour and a half of Charlie's totally incomprehensible cut-up in order to see me at the end in the nighty.

Presenter16:25

This this cut up being he sort of did collages. He did wonderful collages. With enormous skill. Enormous skill. And you really did have to know the play well to do what he did.

Thelma Holt16:28

He did

Thelma Holt16:29

Is it

Thelma Holt16:30

Yes, with the mm.

Presenter16:39

Record number four.

Presenter16:41

Record number four.

Presenter16:43

It's Paul Robeson singing Lazy Bones. Um very difficult for me to choose the Paul Robeson,'cause I'd like the whole lot and we'd be here for a fortnight. I think the voice tells you about the man.

Thelma Holt16:57

Sleeping in the sun How you expect to get your day's work?

Thelma Holt17:06

Never get your day's work done.

Thelma Holt17:11

Sleeping in the noonday sun

Thelma Holt17:15

Uh

Presenter17:15

Paul Robeson singing Lazy Bones, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty three. You took over the Round House in nineteen seventy six, Elmer, the the birthplace of O'Calcutta. It was all in rather a state, wasn't it? Deeply in debt and a reputation

Thelma Holt17:22

Yeah, yeah.

Thelma Holt17:27

And you rip.

Presenter17:29

For drugs, certainly, not to mention sex and knock and roll. Everything. How did you uh how did you rescue it? What did you do?

Thelma Holt17:31

Everything.

Presenter17:35

Well, I I was actually put there um by Anthony Field, who was the finance director of the Arts Council. I can't remember th if that's quite the right title, that's what he was in those days. And it was a mess. And I elected to put on, shocked everybody, forty rock concerts in a row.

Presenter17:58

Not exactly your style. Better than a health farm. Lost Harvestone. Um and trudged up and down this bar in Wellington's'cause the place was a swill with

Thelma Holt17:58

Not exactly your style.

Presenter18:06

Beer, and we paid our debts. It was as simple as that. Or we paid most of them, but they'd never really been in on the ground floor of subsidy and they couldn't get it, so we lived hand to mouth. And we did some wonderful things. You started bringing in foreign stuff. I started bringing in foreign stuff. The thing that I remember with the deepest affection, Michael Elliott, who directed Vanessa, in something perhaps we're going to hear later, very, very fine director, was running the Royal Exchange in Manchester. And he came to me with an idea because the Roundhouse is the same shape as the Royal Exchange. And we did a huge Royal Exchange season, and it was phenomenally successful. I mean, we built, we built a new auditorium.

Speaker 418:20

You started

Thelma Holt18:21

I started.

Presenter18:53

And you put the bums on seats. Oh, yes, yes, because Manchester provided the talent.

Thelma Holt18:53

And you and

Thelma Holt18:55

Fuck.

Presenter18:58

But you had stuff from abroad as well. Then we went into doing the international stuff. We brought Anton Vitaz, who later ran the Comedie Française for a short while before he died.

Thelma Holt19:00

But

Presenter19:08

We brought lots of famous folk. The great one that that had a lasting influence was the Rustavelli, Robert Deruz Rustovelli, who came with Richard the Third.

Presenter19:16

and arrived three days after the Russian offensive in Afghanistan started. So that caused a lot of trouble. That caused my big row with Bob.

Presenter19:25

And it was extraordinary. It was a wonderful, wonderful period, and this production was a very important one. So you made it solvent, you refurbished it. I mean, it was practically rebuilt really while you were there in the between seventy six and eighty three.

Thelma Holt19:36

Yeah in the

Presenter19:38

You curbed its worst excesses, you made it kind of semi-official, really, didn't you began to bring it into sort of the establishment, this People's Palace.

Thelma Holt19:43

Injured.

Thelma Holt19:44

Bring it in.

Presenter19:47

Then six years later it it closed. What was it? Yes. I got to the stage where I felt I'd had enough and I could see that we were never ever going to have the huge injection of cash we needed to run the place. And I remember getting to a stage it's little things that bother you.

Thelma Holt19:49

Yeah.

Presenter20:03

I I would lie in bed at night and think I would love to hear the sound of rain and enjoy it like I used to and now when I hear the sound of rain I leap out of bed and get into a taxi and go to the round house because the roof is leaking.

Presenter20:16

It's an English custom.

Presenter20:18

To try to hang on to things longer than we should, like hanging on to our husbands and hanging on to our businesses. And when it's over, you should go on to something else. Next piece of music. Oh, it's not music. It's Vanessa. It's Vanessa. And I feel that if I were to be on an island, one of the voices I'd miss more than any would be Vanessa's. She has given me such joy. And this, interesting enough, is her Rosalind, of course, which is part of mythology. But it was Michael Elliott, who was the Royal Exchange director who directed this.

Thelma Holt20:30

Oh, it's not music.

Presenter20:58

Um

Presenter20:59

There has never been a Rosalind like her.

Speaker 421:02

Love is merely a madness, and I tell you deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do and the reason why they're not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary, the whippers are in love too.

Speaker 421:15

Yet I

Speaker 421:17

Profess curing it by counsel. Have you ever cured any so? Yes.

Speaker 421:24

One

Speaker 421:26

and in this manner

Speaker 421:29

He was to imagine me.

Speaker 421:32

His love

Speaker 421:33

His mistress and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I be but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour.

Presenter21:56

Vanessa Redgrave and Ian Bannon playing Rosalind and Orlando in Michael Elliott's production of As You Like It, and that was recorded in nineteen sixty two. It does sound peculiarly dated, doesn't it? Her voice was really rather rather grand. Rather grand.

Thelma Holt22:07

Deaths.

Presenter22:09

Trained, you see. We were all trained. But you and she go back a long way, Thelma, don't you? I think you went to Iraq together. For some reason, after the Gulf War. Where did you do that? Very shortly after the war.

Thelma Holt22:16

If a sum

Presenter22:21

where nothing had been

Presenter22:23

repaired or put right, we went to make a film for UNICEF, which was entirely Vanessa's idea.

Presenter22:29

And things were so bad at that time that they didn't bother with us. It was just a couple of nutty English women who were, you know, floating about. I have never ever in my life seen anything like it. I remember on about the third day driving into um Cayote and there was this wonderful, wonderful green haze and it did look very beautiful. And when we got near to it we realized it was sewage. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. You'd been before that to Roumania, of course. Oh yes, I went to Roumania.

Thelma Holt22:55

Q drop 8

Thelma Holt22:58

Well yes, he went

Presenter23:00

Now that was that was something much more positive. I I went to Romania with uh on behalf of Richard Eyre.

Presenter23:06

Who sent me to look at Karamicu's Hamlet? And when I got there, Caramiccio had just been made vice president, and we went into this.

Speaker 423:13

Good.

Presenter23:14

beautiful old building with a sort of little lady sitting typing on an old fashioned typing machine and it she looked like Krupskaya. I thought I could cast this lot. And I walked into this vast room and approached him. He was at the end and said, Jan

Presenter23:28

I'm not quite sure of how I should address you. Harold Nicholson's good behaviour does not equip a lady like me for knowing how to address somebody who's just been made Vice President. He said Thelma.

Presenter23:39

If I'm playing Hamlet, you can call me Jan. If I'm not playing Hamlet, you can call me mister Vice President. I said, Well, I think Richard said you're playing Hamlet. So he did. But when I came out of the airport, the whole place was burning.

Presenter23:53

And the British Councilman said, there's a young man waiting for you here. And I said, no way, I don't know anybody. And as we came through, he said, it's absolutely insistent, he's waiting for you. And as we came through, I saw this very tall thing topped with a blonde head and said, Oh dear God, it's my nephew, the last thing I want in the world. And my nephew was a journalist and was then working for the Guardian. And I took him to the Victor Babbish Clinic for children. And he came home and raised a great deal of money via the Guardian, about $175,000 for this AIDS clinic for children. One of the very rare occasions, and I've been glad to see family.

Presenter24:30

Next record.

Presenter24:31

When I was small, like everybody else, um I didn't quite know the difference between life and death.

Presenter24:37

And when people died, one thought they'd gone away, which makes one assume they may come back. So I thought that Kelly, the boy from Calawn, I was good at hearing words, and there's a wonderful line in it which says, seven feet is his height with some inches to spare, and he rides like a king in command, and I thought he might suit me quite well.

Speaker 424:57

Tell me who is the giant with the gold curling hair, He who strides at the head of your band. Seven feet is his height, with some inches to spare, And he looks like a king in command. Comely, boys, that's the pride of the Beau Chamaliers, amongst our greatest of heroes, amen. So sing your beavers aloud, then give three ringing.

Thelma Holt25:07

He does his height with s-

Speaker 425:27

Uh

Presenter25:27

The Dubliners and Kelly, the boy from Kellan. You have a reputation, Thelma Holt, domestically anyway, for being rather eccentric, eating champagne in the washing machine, or having no doors in your flat, I mean, or not recognising an actor on the television, although it turns out you'd once been married to him.

Thelma Holt25:35

Shem

Speaker 225:38

That's right.

Presenter25:43

Yes, that's true. That was in a in a series. And the actor was David Pressman, who was quite lovely. He was what is called an import. He was in Man in a Glass Booth, the Harold Pinter stroke Bob Shaw thing with Donald Pleasance. And he was the one American in it. But you married him for his legs, beautiful legs. Very, very long. Mind you, this was before the days of David Morrissey. I needn't have looked so far if David Morrissey had been around. It probably explains why you didn't recognise him on the telly. I only looked at the legs. It's it is peculiar, really, your reputation, because there's this sort of

Presenter26:20

As we say, rather eccentric side to you, but there's also this sort of rather scary side to you, it seems to me. Apparently, the people in your office, if they can't, when they're doing a negotiation, get their way, they threaten people with putting you on the case. Yes, I'm afraid they do. They say, Shall we do this the nice way or the nasty way? Do it with me, or do it with Selma. And I think that's some kind of myth because I'm not difficult. I know what we need, I know what we want, and also I have this feeling that I don't go for martyrdom, but it's not me I'm doing it for. So I'm absolutely convinced that I'm doing it the right way. So you don't worry if you're not liked, briefly. You don't take any prisoners? Certainly not. I would worry desperately if I weren't liked by people I want to like me. That's a weakness in me. I don't want to be liked. I want to be loved. I don't want to be adored, but I want to be loved.

Thelma Holt26:56

Briefly.

Thelma Holt26:59

Certainly not.

Presenter27:12

And those that can actually see their way through to handling that do extremely well. I'm a willing slave.

Presenter27:19

Record number seven.

Presenter27:21

This one

Presenter27:23

I apologise to the purists because this is Patra Bell, but it's been treated by Nina Gauer, and it's the music that we had in the play Tango at the end of winter. And Alan Rickman played the leading role. I think he is a great actor. And he dies better than anybody. And he died to this music.

Speaker 428:26

Uh

Speaker 428:27

Cama musiro mo

Speaker 428:37

Susan on the line.

Speaker 428:41

Carla and Goshen.

Speaker 428:44

No one has there.

Speaker 428:48

You are glad.

Presenter29:01

Part of Pachobel's Canon in D from the Ninagawa Company's production of Tango at the End of Winter and memories of Alan Rickman's Dying. Next year, you become the first Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford. Your predecessors are Eminent Thelma, Arthur Miller, Richard Attenborough, Richard Eyre. How are you going to be different? Scary, isn't it?

Presenter29:23

Um well, the first difference would be that I um

Presenter29:27

A woman.

Presenter29:28

Um they're all traps. Um I was very nervous about accepting this, and did say to Cameron, every time somebody does something because of vanity it is normally a mistake.

Presenter29:41

I must think about it very seriously. And then I thought, yes, perhaps I can do something. It will be quite useful. Um I can talk.

Presenter29:49

About if I can do it, God knows anybody can, so I should give you all hope.

Presenter29:53

But I actually will call in my marker on my friends. We began by talking about money and as an independent operator it's obviously very important to you. But I guess in the end you're not really in it for the money, are you? No.

Presenter30:06

No.

Presenter30:07

There's only so much you can do with money, and I don't think I would do any more. People say if you got frightfully rich, what would you do? What would you do if you won the lottery? Well, if I won the lottery, I'd probably give most of it to the National Theatre. I wouldn't get much chance not to. The National Theatre would take it. But there isn't much more I could do. I would certainly put a few more people through drama school because there's great hardship there, and even though we've made it a bit better at the Arts Council, it's not quite as good as it should be. But I don't actually need it for myself. I'm very lucky.

Presenter30:42

And you're lucky'cause you've ended up doing what you wanted to do.

Thelma Holt30:44

Uh

Speaker 230:44

Yeah

Thelma Holt30:44

Yeah.

Presenter30:45

Let me make one more guess. Marooned on a desert island with um no friends, you know, no productions, no gallery to play to, nobody, nothing, you'd swallow the poison, wouldn't you? You'd make the dramatic exception. Certainly. I do it very well.

Thelma Holt30:54

Yeah.

Presenter30:59

Direct it myself, not

Thelma Holt30:59

Directive.

Presenter31:02

Last record.

Presenter31:04

Yes, um now I make absolutely no apology for the fact that two of my eight um come from the same source, Yukio Ninagawa.

Presenter31:12

And it's really because my life changed when I met him.

Presenter31:16

Um I have the most enormous admiration for him, but I also have deep, deep affection. He has enriched my life greatly, and we've never done a production that that hasn't made me feel enormously proud, every single one of them.

Presenter31:33

This, our last one, is um Yoji Maduda singing Ariel's song of freedom from the tempest, and I have a rather sweet story about that. Ariel was dressed as part of a Japanese sect. When they travel, they wear white and they wear a little sort of square thing on top, like a bee bee hat, and to see them you have to lift it. When they arrived and put their clothes on, I was in the lift with this boy, who actually looks about twelve and turned out to be twenty-eight. And I was looking at him, and I hear that Judy Dench went into the green room and said Felma's in the lift unwrapping her present from the Japanese.

Speaker 432:27

Oh no,

Presenter32:43

Yoji Matuda singing Ariel song from Ninagawa's production of The Tempest composed by Ryudu Uzaki.

Presenter32:50

If you could only take one of those eight records, Thelma, this is the difficult choice, really. Which one would you take? Paul Robesman.

Presenter32:58

Mm lazy bones lying on the desert island before you snuff it. What about your book? You've got the Bible and you've got Shakespeare.

Thelma Holt32:58

Lazy Bones

Thelma Holt33:00

And before you

Thelma Holt33:02

What about

Presenter33:05

Yes, um and thank heavens I have, because um there's a great deal I can do with those.

Presenter33:12

I would take

Presenter33:13

Thomas More's Utopia. Why?

Presenter33:16

I read it when I was seventeen at school. I've met a lot of other people who read it round about that time, six or sixteen or seventeen, and you don't read it again, but you keep remembering bits of it. Now I've used it, I've had it lying around in my bedroom for centuries, and I look things up that I remember, but I've never had the time to read the whole book.

Presenter33:36

It is, since that time, it is the most extraordinary book. It was written 500 years ago, but it is a book about the future. It's said about this book that it is the basis, or was the basis, for communism. I don't agree with that at all, because it doesn't only address the physical well-being of those people who live in Utopia, but it addresses their spiritual well-being, which of course Communism did not.

Presenter34:03

And it seems it's such vision in it. He had such wonderful, wonderful ideas of how to make things work. What about your luxury? My rosary beads. Your rosary. Yes, I like my rosary beads.

Thelma Holt34:13

Yeah.

Presenter34:16

Thelma Holt, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island disc. Thank you.

Speaker 234:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.