Mark Rylance

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the actor Mark Rylance. Getting a ticket to see him perform is widely regarded as a guarantee you'll witness theatrical magic. He can barely set foot on stage or set these days without winning an award. Olivier's, Tony's, Abafta, he has got the lot. And he's come to the attention of a new and highly appreciative audience through his role as Thomas Cromwell in the BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall.

Presenter0:58

So where did it all begin? Well, his father's deep love of literature and poems he was an English teacher and his mother's rebellious streak and love of ritual seem like the perfect creative compost to feed a youngster who would go on to become one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. Odd, though, that as a child he was cripplingly shy, not speaking till he was six. He says I learned to speak, and it made me very appreciative of words and speaking. It also meant that from the early part of my life I had listened and watched a lot and so listening and watching a lot, do you think that's at the very heart of good acting?

Mark Rylance1:37

Yeah. Listening particular, yeah. I like having my parents described as compost. Creative compost. Creative compost, of course. I was trying to be nice.

Presenter1:42

Creative composition

Presenter1:45

I was trying to be nice.

Presenter1:48

So you've been, well, very well known to theatre audiences for many, many years now, but I think it would be fair to say much less well known to T V viewers. Well, that's all changed, of course, with the success of Wolf Hall and with you'll have a couple of big films coming out soon.

Presenter2:04

You are suddenly going to be much, much more recognizable. Have you thought about how that is going to materially change your life?

Mark Rylance2:12

I I think I feel happy to be coming to it at fifty-four, fifty-five rather than at twenty, twenty-one. I I feel like I've dodged a a bullet there, that that that's quite a difficult fate to hit this kind of um this kind of world where there's a lot of risk and so there's a lot of people all the time going, Oh, it's great, it's fantastic. There's a whole kind of circle around people being very positive and and about things.

Presenter2:38

Does that make you suspicious automatically? Yeah, automatically, yeah.

Mark Rylance2:43

Yeah. But I can see also why they're being positive in what's going on. I th and I I have less interest to believe it now.

Presenter2:49

You play the part of Thomas Cromwell in the B B C's adaptation of uh Wolf Hall. Tell me about the process of bringing such a big character to the small screen.

Mark Rylance2:59

Yeah.

Mark Rylance3:01

We were talking about that over dinner last night, and someone said you must act exactly the same on the stage as in front of the camera.

Mark Rylance3:08

In terms of whether your emotions are truly felt, whether you're thinking things through and discovering things. So all those things are the same. Acting's a mixture of reaching out to people, which I would call a kind of electric thing. You have to stir and engage their imagination at times, and at other times being more like a magnet and drawing them towards you. It's really about hiding and revealing. Say the famous nunnery scene of Hamlet and Ophelia. When does Hamlet discover that Ophelia's father is secretly watching? And when does he reveal that he knows that? But obviously you've got to play your cards a lot closer to your chest when there's a camera.

Presenter3:48

So Mark Rylands, I know that even getting your list has been well something of a struggle.

Presenter3:53

Uh

Mark Rylance3:53

Yeah, I I have very loose boundaries and I love lots of different types of music so it's been very hard to distil down to eight. Tell me about the first one this morning then. What what's well this is Coleman Hawkins and um my friend John pointed this out to me as probably the greatest saxophone solo he he knows and I agree. I I just think it's a extraordinary saxophone solo. But th this song which is called Body and Soul, you can really hear the kind of life of the body that we all lead. And then the saxophone is this marvellous soul, this psyche that we have in our dreams and in our waking moments too.

Speaker 44:36

Uh

Presenter5:29

That was Coleman Hawkins and Body and Soul. For many years then, Mark Rylands, you have worked predominantly on stage. Not entirely. There have been some films along the way. You were in Angels and Insects and Grass Arena was another. I wonder if staying largely in the theatre was very much a conscious decision for you?

Mark Rylance5:50

Well, maybe it was. I I I've made a number of films. There've been odd films, you know, The Institute Venumenta and Intimacy and The Government Inspector was wi it was a good film. I I I went up for a lot of film auditions, but they didn't work out very well. I don't I don't uh

Presenter6:05

I don't think I really understood it. You said to one interviewer that one of the things that interested you was that, you know, film was just a certain moment's performance captured at that time.

Presenter6:17

And sort of frozen. Whereas when you are on stage, nothing is reheated. You don't take what you did from the night before.

Mark Rylance6:24

No, no.

Presenter6:25

Every time is fresh seems a very interesting thing.

Mark Rylance6:27

Do a shift

Presenter6:28

If you go to a restaurant

Mark Rylance6:29

You don't want them to come out and say, We've got some things we served last night that we can reheat for you. You you want the meal cooked fresh, for you and and likewise in the theatre.

Mark Rylance6:40

There was a quite a big turning point in 1987 when I was quite poor and uh I auditioned for Steven Spielberg for a film called Empire of the Sun and he offered me a very small part and I'd just been in a terrible film with my hero Bob Dylan and had such a bad time in it. So I turned it down the part and then he came back and offered me a better part, Spielberg.

Mark Rylance7:01

And then within a couple of hours Mike Alfreds, my great teacher and mentor in the theatre, who I wanted to work for for ages, said, I have got this new season at the National, come and be part of it.

Mark Rylance7:12

And I did all the lists, you know, of the benefits of both. I could they were completely equal. And I turned eventually to the I Ching, and you just ask it where now? and it gives an answer, and the answer it gave if I went to the theatre was Community.

Mark Rylance7:28

And that swayed it for me. And I thought, yes, I had never experienced community on film sets.

Mark Rylance7:34

Because the community is amongst the technicians, the actors come and go. But in the theatre you go through the deaths and the births and the happy and low moments o of a group.

Mark Rylance7:43

So, um, that decided it for me and it and it was because of that decision that I met my my wife, Claire.

Presenter7:48

There. So much to talk about, Mark Rowlands. For now it's time for some more music. Tell me about your second piece this morning. Wha why have you chosen this, and what are we going to hear?

Mark Rylance7:57

Oh, this is my beloved sister, Susanna, singing, who who uh trained to be an opera singer. And then she became a novelist, and she has a wonderful family, and has just been such a great sister to me. And I I went on her to sing this at the Royal Opera House, which is a real treat, sitting way, way up high and seeing my sister playing Cupid in King Arthur uh by Purcell.

Speaker 48:21

I design design that I'm walking. I design.

Mark Rylance8:23

Oh yeah.

Speaker 48:28

Designed her children.

Mark Rylance8:28

Yeah.

Speaker 48:30

It's fine, it's a cold weather, I've got it all gathered.

Speaker 48:35

Tis I, tis I, it is I that have wanted Tisby that is I, tie that have wanted.

Presenter9:18

Tis I that have warned you from King Arthur by Purcell, played there by Lesare Florison, conducted by William Christie and the soloist, was your sister, Susannah Waters. So, Mark Rylance, you say your twenties then was you know you had a lot to work out and you wouldn't have been ready for fame had it hit you then. Tell me about your twenties. What what was it you were working out?

Mark Rylance9:34

The

Mark Rylance9:37

Yeah.

Presenter9:38

Yeah.

Mark Rylance9:38

I was very intense. I felt I wanted to change things. Were you very idealistic? I was idealistic. I I got together with friends. I started a cooperative theatre company to try working without a director. I had troubles with authority figures. I was a very joyous character at times, but very uh uh isolated and melancholy at other times. Very, very serious, far too serious. And and of course I'd come from a very different culture from the Midwest of America. Arriving in London, I didn't really know what a pub was. And of course the news in the Midwest was terrible. I didn't know anything. So I had a lot to catch up with. I think I had some issues with honesty too. I don't think I was uh able to be honest. I needed to be liked too much. I think that's the kind of miner's dust of an actor's life, is that you are a professional liar and you can not only lie to others, you can lie to yourself.

Presenter10:24

That you

Presenter10:30

You were born in Britain, and then your parents moved. Well, you were very young when they moved to America. I was born in America.

Mark Rylance10:34

I was born in Willsborough in Ashford in Kent.

Mark Rylance10:37

My parents first went to Cyprus, where my brother was born, because my father had been in America and and his visa had run out, so we couldn't go there immediately. That's where he wanted to go. He wanted to teach in America.

Mark Rylance10:49

My mother did not want to leave England and thought we'd only go for a few years.

Mark Rylance10:55

But in 1962 we sailed on the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth, I can't remember which, and I think it's my earliest memory.

Mark Rylance11:05

We arrive in New York and I'm I'm on a bunk in one of those liners playing with a little toy castle set. I can see it now, little wooden drawbridge and little characters that came and went. And my father says, Come here, look out this round window. And I go to the window and it's the Statue of Liberty passing by. And recently I I've been really lucky to have some plays that have gone to Broadway and lived down there in Chelsea for wa when we were doing Jerusalem. And I used to run along the the Hudson River there and try to imagine which of these piers I first arrived at.

Mark Rylance11:39

Time for some more music now, then, Mark Ryland. It's your third. What are we going to hear? Oh, I had a wonderful music teacher when I was in high school in America, and he said, Why don't you study Charles Ives? and I'm so grateful to him because Charles Ives is the father of modern music and he had a father who would detune pianos and have two marching bands march through the town while he and young Charles stood at the top of the steeple and listened to the cacophony of two marching bands playing different tunes coming into town and out of town again. And so Charles had a very original take on what music could be. This is a recording of Charles Ives singing a song called They Are There, which I think should be the American anthem. And it's been revived by the Kronos Quartet. They're playing along with this very old recording of Charles Ives singing this song.

Speaker 412:27

And where through this curves at war, all started by sneaking culture, making slaves on men, goddamn it, then let all the people rise and stand together and find humanity. Those wars are made by small, stupid, selfish boys and groups. My love people have no say. But there come a day, hip-hop, when they'll smash all dictators to the

Speaker 412:55

Yeah.

Speaker 412:57

The people's world nation who play every honest country free to live his own name right They'll start before the right But when it comes to life They'll they'll be well, they'll be ten

Presenter13:11

They Are There performed by Charles Ives and the Kronos Quartet. You had a damn good laugh through that, Mark Ryland.

Mark Rylance13:16

I love it. I I really love that song. That makes me think of all the wonderful activists I I've known in my life. And that seems such a great rattling call for freedom.

Presenter13:26

Has that, I wonder, got anything to do with your mother, Anne, the fact that you like activists so much? I mean, she was somebody who well articulated her protestations against the world.

Mark Rylance13:36

She did. She certainly did. In the sixties and seventies my mother in America was very affected by the fight for rights for women. My grandfather said about her, Your dear chap, he said, Your mother will never be satisfied, which infuriated my mother that he said that. But she was always seeing how things could be better and and making efforts to do that fearlessly.

Mark Rylance14:00

I'll give a quick example. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Episcopalian, Anglican. We went to both churches on holidays and alternated. And she was very involved in this little church run by Father Bill. But one weekend, Father Bill went out into the countryside and came back saying God had spoken to him. And he said, I'm going to reveal in the sermon today what it is. My mother was on the altar holding the bread and wine and doing that kind of thing. Anyway, Father Bill stood up on this day and said that God had told him that women should never be priests or bishops or have any leadership role in the church. And my mother, standing behind, thought, well, everyone's going to think I agree with this because I'm dressed in the same white gear. I'm up on the platform with him. So she stepped forward at the end of the sermon and said, I just feel I need to make clear to you all that I completely disagree with what Father Bill has said. And I remember my father and my brother and sister, and I said.

Mark Rylance14:53

Thinking we were going to be lynched. But all that happened was we didn't go to that church anymore.

Presenter14:59

And what about this business of you not talking?

Mark Rylance15:02

Talking until you were six. That's true, is it? Yes, it is. I'm I'm I talked, but I think I talked more like um

Mark Rylance15:12

That's my best impersonation of myself. Only my brother could understand me. What was going on? Why were you not talking?

Mark Rylance15:19

Very interesting subject. A friend of mine, James Hillman, wrote a great book where he looked at the behaviour of people who were known, like Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt. Not that they're different than other people, but because we know what they did and what they were like as children. And he said that though there were many things that people changed about themselves, there was in every patient he'd ever worked with there was a kind of core, essential thing that would not change and seemed to be timeless. And so whether some part of me had some intimation that I might one day get out in front of 2,500 people at the Palace Theatre and say to be or not to be and keep my nerve with such famous words.

Mark Rylance16:00

He he would propose that my young soul knew that and was terrified and doing everything to avoid that fate. And is there something of that that chimes with you? You don't think that's outlandish? No, I don't think James is outlandish. James is a scientist and uh a doctor and I I I think there's evidence for consciousness that's not limited by our physical um nature.

Presenter16:09

Do we think that

Presenter16:11

It is.

Presenter16:21

It's time for your fourth. Tell me about this.

Mark Rylance16:24

Well, I really adore uh Bob Dylan's songs and lyrics. I like the mystery of them. And I also love Nina Simone's singing. And so this is this is just like Tom Thumb's blues, but sung by Nina Simone. And I think the mixture of them is like a ver very nice salad and salad dressing.

Speaker 316:45

When you're lost in worries

Speaker 316:49

And it's Easter time too.

Speaker 316:55

And your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through

Speaker 317:06

Don't put on any L's

Speaker 317:09

When you're down on Roma Avenue

Speaker 317:15

They've got some hungry women there, and men they'll really make a mess out of you.

Presenter17:23

Just like Tom Sun's Blues sung by Nina Simone. Um, it was when you were first at school that you you actually played Hamlet, you weren't just in the play, right?

Mark Rylance17:30

Yeah, I skipped all the other parts in Shakespeare and went straight to Hamlet. How old were you?

Mark Rylance17:36

I was fifteen when I no I was sixteen. I learnt it over that summer, nineteen seventy six.

Mark Rylance17:42

We used to come every summer to England to be to visit grandparents and relatives. My mother's parents lived in Kent, in Sissinghurst, and I spent m my summers there idyllic summers and

Mark Rylance17:54

My parents paid for it by taking American high school students to the theatre and to the Raw Tournament, Stonehenge, uh all these different things. So I I would be taken along to all these things and I that summer I I carried Little Hamlet around and then played it in the autumn at school and my father played the gravedigger. I don't know I mean, I don't know why, it just never seemed foreign to me, Shakespeare. It seemed to immediately express what I didn't have words to express.

Presenter18:21

And I have picked out Hamlet there for obvious reasons, but I I'm wondering for you what stands out in your memory of that time in your life.

Mark Rylance18:29

Well, I remember a particular night in the winter walking up to go to a hockey game. Now I played ice hockey. But I was going up to watch a hockey game, and I just was dreading it. I just wasn't very good at parties and social things like that. And as I walked up the part of the school where the theatre was, which is a very old wooden gymnasium, and there was a little light on, bleeding out through the blackened windows, and I thought, Oh, they're in there building the set.

Mark Rylance18:56

And I'd always loved building forts and things like that when I was younger.

Mark Rylance19:00

And I remember standing and thinking, where do I want to go? Do I really want to meet these people and go and I thought, No, I want to go in there and I went and knocked on the door, and sure enough, um, a funny guy called Dick Rubinstein

Mark Rylance19:12

opened the door, and he welcomed me in, and for for a long time I just would carry the rubbish to the end of the school down the dark corridors.

Mark Rylance19:21

We used to hide in the um ventilation shafts when they locked up the theater and the janitors went home, and then we would come out and work through the night building the sets and putting the lighting up and things like that, and again it was just an incredible community and

Mark Rylance19:34

And it was a turning point that night, and I I never looked back.

Mark Rylance19:38

Tell me about the first uh musical that you were in, The Me That Nobody Knows. I did do musicals. American high school theatre programmes have musicals, so I played Don Quixote and The Man with La Mancha and Pseudolis in um Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And the first musical, Yes, Me Nobody Knows, was a a musical about hard life in New York, heroin addicts and things like this. And it was a very good thing for the school to do because all the kids were rather privileged. We were all privileged.

Mark Rylance20:10

And so this was a look at something else.

Mark Rylance20:13

And uh I was only fourteen or fifteen in it.

Mark Rylance20:16

But my parents came and uh we had about a forty five minute drive home in the VW bus with my sister and my brother. And there was a big cast, thirty five or so. They mentioned everybody else but me. Oh, Phil Phil he was marvellous. I never thought he had it in him. Marvellous hitter. And uh very later on my father admitted to me that they they thought I was just terrible, absolutely terrible, and they didn't know what to say. And uh I don't think I was very good, so I think they were probably right.

Presenter20:47

Oh, well, it's time for some more music then, Mark Ryans. It's your fifth of the morning. Tell me a bit about this.

Mark Rylance20:53

Oh yeah. I well I really loved to dance and I particularly loved uh dancing with my daughters Natasha and Juliet. But when I arrived in England in 78 and then in the early eighties, w one thing was the sex pistols and punk music was such an inspiration, but the other, maybe slightly more long lasting Joy on a Desert Island, would be a good reggae tune. So I found this lovely song by Justin Hines and the Dominoes, which Natasha gave me actually on a C D. And I I think this one will keep me dancing for a while on the islands.

Speaker 421:28

Yeah.

Speaker 421:31

What you gonna say?

Speaker 421:35

Yeah.

Speaker 421:39

Oh yay.

Speaker 421:42

What you gonna say?

Speaker 421:46

Oh yeah.

Speaker 421:50

Once a man

Speaker 421:52

Why it's so dry?

Presenter22:01

Once a man, twice a child, Justin Hines, and The Dominoes. Did you feel when you came to London, you won a place at Rada.

Presenter22:10

Did did you feel like an American in London, or did you feel like

Mark Rylance22:13

Like a just a British person who'd been away.

Mark Rylance22:15

I had considered myself English in America. My my mother used to throw a tea party on July 4th and fly the English flag and make jokes about the colonies. And we w I was called the Limey and um I had a Midwest accent. So it was an enormous shock. I arrived in London and was called the American. And I knew very little about American culture actually. So I it was a very strange thing.

Mark Rylance22:40

It's funny to think that there's racism about Americans, but there is a kind of there's a lot of anger about America and a lot of love and

Mark Rylance22:47

a fascination about America. So people presumed a lot about you from your accent. And I I hid and buried my American accent as best I could. I uh uh as an actor I didn't I wanted to be able to disappear more y um in in and listen and see without standing out so much.

Presenter23:06

When you were at Radha then in those early days, did you did you find that whenever you were involved in in the process of of working out how better and best to do things, you lost that shyness? Was that the sort of comfort for you in in acting in the beginning?

Mark Rylance23:21

Um, I think I probably learned to speak by acting when I was speechless, when I was younger, by by um.

Mark Rylance23:29

I with friends, just acting for hours and hours in the basement or in the woods or on the campuses of these schools, and I think playing other people always uh gave me a channel to speak. That was how I learnt to speak and to to be. So it always felt more comfortable and I forgot myself uh when I pretended to be someone else. So it yes, it was a great relief. So it so in that way the the there that's another connection between being speechless, something that might have really worried

Mark Rylance23:59

apparent, but actually it propelled me into something that fortunately I've been lucky enough to have the right attributes to be successful at.

Presenter24:08

Tell me how you met your wife.

Mark Rylance24:10

I met my wife.

Mark Rylance24:13

On the first day of rehearsals of The Wandering Jew at the National Theatre, we were going to rehearse for twelve weeks and it it didn't work out so well, this show, but uh Claire was there, she was to be the musical director. I'd given up on relationships at the time, I thought I just was hopeless that and that I was had just hurt people and was no good. So I thought maybe I just need to be wild and free and reckless and I was a bit reckless because Claire was married to Chris and had two young children. But their marriage was going through a hard time and now we're a five-person family in that Chris is probably one of my best friends and has been very, very forgiving and he'd go on long walks together and he's just a f just a fantastic, fantastic man. So I'm kind of co-father. I think like pilot and co-pilot because my girls won't let me say I'm the stepfather.

Mark Rylance25:08

as as they were three and seven at the time.

Presenter25:11

Particularly then, why have you picked this composition, of course? What is it about about this one that you

Presenter25:17

It stands out.

Mark Rylance25:19

Well

Mark Rylance25:21

Claire has written so much wonderful music.

Mark Rylance25:24

A as you know, my youngest our youngest daughter, Natasha, died on the first of July, twenty twelve, and and uh very fortunately my eldest daughter, Juliet, and her husband decided to make a film.

Mark Rylance25:37

Um and uh it was a version of The Seagull uh reset in the nineteen eighties and filmed in Connecticut.

Mark Rylance25:44

And uh

Mark Rylance25:46

We all were together for that spring. Natasha worked on the film. Juliet, of course, was producing it and acting in it. I acted in it. Claire was writing the music. And we we were all together for the for the final months of Natasha's life. And indeed she died on the the flight back.

Mark Rylance26:04

But Claire had to carry on and write m um the music for the film in the months after that. And it it

Mark Rylance26:12

You know, obviously she was she was we were all devastated, but for a mother to lose a child is is uh just unthinkable.

Mark Rylance26:21

But she she was able to write this music. This is one of the pieces for that film. So I just think it was a very remarkable thing for her to do.

Presenter27:32

Music from the soundtrack of the film Days and Nights composed by Your Wife Claire Van Kampen.

Presenter27:39

You were an artistic director of The Globe for I think it was a decade. One of the the things that is probably most apparent if you're a theatre goer there is that you are watching something as it would have been watched at the time that Shakespeare was writing the plays that he was writing. To the best of our ability.

Mark Rylance27:57

Yeah.

Presenter27:58

The audience is almost part of the whole thing. I mean, the audience is incredibly devastating.

Mark Rylance28:02

Almost devastated. Yeah.

Presenter28:03

Yeah.

Mark Rylance28:03

Well that's the big thing about the Globe is the audience you realize he gave the audience so much power they can come and go without it being embarrassing. In most theatres, other theatres now, if you really are fed up and bored, it's usually a very embarrassing walk, you know, getting everyone else to stand up as you leave. But in the Globe, you can leave at any moment and you come back in again. He welcomes the physical nature of humanity into the building.

Presenter28:26

You took your Hamlet for a one-off performance to Broadmoor. What what did the psychiatric hospital uh what did the audience there make of it?

Mark Rylance28:36

Well, we were very concerned that things like the the violent treatment of Ophelia, the murder of Polonius it was a modern dress production at the RSC and and I was in pajamas and stuff. It was it wasn't distanced by period. And uh about a hundred and fifty people crammed in. Maybe eighty were staff and nurses. The nurses were the ones who actually got us

Mark Rylance29:01

in and the doctors were against it. The nurses said, No, if it upsets them, that's fine. Until they get upset, they don't get better. Uh m m most of the patients there have killed someone they dearly love and so they have to realize who they are and what they've

Mark Rylance29:16

what they've done, and then not kill themselves, but actually have some hope that there's a point to to carry on with their lives and to learn what the triggers are that that disturbed them so. Did you talk to any of the patients afterwards? Yeah, we went back a week later, and actually the thing that had affected them most was the um graveyard scene.

Mark Rylance29:36

I used to jump into the grave and say, I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers, with all their quantity of love, could not make up my sum. And I always thought, in performance, I'm amazed that some woman doesn't stand up in the audience and say, How dare you say that

Mark Rylance29:52

with the way you treated her and projected on to her all your problems.

Mark Rylance29:57

And uh

Mark Rylance29:58

A young man, a patient at the hospital, that day when we acted it, came over when I said that line, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, I believe you.

Mark Rylance30:07

and it was the most remarkable thing.

Mark Rylance30:10

remarkable um

Mark Rylance30:11

Moment.

Mark Rylance30:12

Me.

Mark Rylance30:14

So it it we we in that case we we all learned something from it. So the the the doctors could say to the patients, I imagine, why we why did you weep when that happened? But it would be easier to talk about the play than to talk about your own problems.

Presenter30:28

Yeah.

Presenter30:29

Let's have some more music, Mike.

Presenter30:31

Uh tell me what we're going to hear next.

Mark Rylance30:32

Oh yeah, this is Andy Irvine and Paul Brady who I just think fantastic Irish musicians and singers. And it's a very old song, Arthur McBride and the Sergeant, which is about an English sergeant trying to forcefully conscript two Irishmen who are walking on Christmas morning. I think we won't hear the whole song. What we'll hear is the approach from the English sergeant. But what we won't hear, unfortunately, and I advise everyone to listen to it, is the is the marvellous treatment that the Irishmen give to the English sergeant. But it makes me think of all the brave, brave, conscientious objectors to the First World War. I wish many more had been able to do it. So this song is for all those who are brave enough to

Mark Rylance31:21

to say no to war.

Speaker 431:23

Home me and my cousin won a fair like bride As we went walking down by the seaside Now mark what followed and what it betide For it being on Christmas morning Out for recreation we went on a tramp And we met Sergeant Upper and Corporal Vampire

Speaker 431:50

And a little wee drummer intending to come for the day being pleasant and charming.

Presenter31:59

That was Andy Irvine and Paul Brady with Arthur McBride. You've spoken about the fact that you enjoy being part of a company of people that for you being involved in the acting profession is that is a great part of it. Aside from that,

Presenter32:15

When you are actually acting, occupying the character, what is it about it that you really enjoy? You strike me as you came in today, you're a very playful person. You like to play. I like to play.

Mark Rylance32:23

I like to play, yeah, and I realized in my thirties I I just love to play act. Maybe it's also being part of a story. Li life seems so chaotic, and in play you're part of a story. I just get lots of ideas and things happen uh on the stage on a good night, on most nights now.

Mark Rylance32:42

In fact, I look forward to accidents and things going wrong on stage. I think, oh great, now it's going to happen when people forget lines or I forget lines or things go f because they become so present. But in life I'm much more critical and much more Self-conscious.

Presenter32:58

An unbearable cruelty. But of course, I must cast you away to this desert island. Oh, yeah. Yes. Have you imagined it in your head?

Presenter33:07

I think I'll be lonely. Will it matter that there's no audience?

Mark Rylance33:12

No.

Mark Rylance33:13

No.

Mark Rylance33:14

No. There'll be an audience anyway. There'll be the sea and the wind and the stars and the all the joys of being an animist and a pagan will will come to fruition on my my desert kingdom. How useful for you. And tell me about your eighth there.

Presenter33:28

Add it.

Presenter33:29

And what are we going to hear finally today?

Mark Rylance33:32

Well, I think the late quartets of Beethoven interesting talking about the benefits of limitation and and um the the fact that Turner painted those wonderful paintings when he could hardly see and that Beethoven wrote these late quartets when he couldn't hear any more i is a remarkable thing. There's so much focus that you have to do things when you're younger. Now that I'm older of course I'm very interested in in artists who did great things when they were very old.

Mark Rylance34:00

Another useful philosophy of mine. But anyway, I think this um I think the 132 is probably the saddest and most profound piece of music I know. This is a quartet that follows that, and and um it's a particular movement in it which lifts out of that mood that he has set, and particularly this Bush quartet from the nineteen thirties. And I also like that the recording you can still hear the scratchiness that it's basically gut and wood and it's manifested quite crudely, this exquisite music.

Presenter35:30

That was part of the second movement of Beethoven's Quartette No. Sixteen in F Sharp, played by the Bush Quartette. So we come then, Mark, to the books. I give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take one other book. What are you going to take?

Mark Rylance35:43

I take this book of the poetry and writings of of Rumi, the great uh Sufi poet. It's called The Big Red Book, The Great Masterpiece Celebrating Mystical Love and Friendship, and thi this will satisfy me.

Presenter35:57

Right, that is yours then, and

Mark Rylance35:58

The luxury

Presenter35:58

What were you actually doing?

Mark Rylance36:00

Well, I think I'm going to take the stand up bass that my wife bought me when I left the Globe, and I ha as she reminded me this morning, you haven't touched it. I have touched it, but I I at one time played bass in a in a band when I was a teenager. And listening to music today, I think I could learn to play along in some way. I think that would keep me occupied.

Presenter36:13

Hmm.

Mark Rylance36:19

Yeah.

Presenter36:19

That's yours.

Mark Rylance36:20

Then and one track to s

Presenter36:21

See, oh, I think I'll take the Beethoven.

Presenter36:25

It's yours, Mark Rylands. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thanks.

Presenter37:10

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter37:13

You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.