Sir Gregory Doran

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:52

My castaway this week is the theatre director, Sir Gregory Doran. As former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he's been called one of the greatest Shakespeareans of our age. He stepped back in 2023 after 10 years in post, 35 years with the company, and after directing 50 productions. His contribution to the exploration and evolution of Shakespeare's work may be unmatched. He staged every play in Shakespeare's first folio, including the landmark 2008 production of Hamlet, starring David Tennant and Sir Patrick Stewart. He set Julius Caesar in modern-day Africa, created the RSC's first gender-balanced Shakespeare play, and brought Dame Judy Dench back to the company after 25 years. He grew up just outside Preston and has his mother to thank for his obsession with Shakespeare. She was a member of an amateur dramatics club and took him to the RSC to see Dame Eileen Atkins in As You Like It. Driving back up the M6 together in her little beige mini, he told her, That's what I want to do when I grow up. He says, I find more sustenance, more profundity, more compassion, more philosophy, and more simple truth in Shakespeare than I have ever found in the Bible. Sartre said that in a secular age, most people feel a God-shaped hole in their consciousness. I here declare that I filled mine with Shakespeare. Sir Greg Doran, welcome to Desert Islanders.

Sir Gregory Doran2:16

Thank you very much indeed, Lauren. Lovely to be here.

Presenter2:19

Well, it's great to have you, especially as you've been on a global pilgrimage for a while recently, Greg. You've been seeing as many copies as you can of Shakespeare's first folio. You've been calling it the Folio Road Show. That's right.

Sir Gregory Doran2:31

Yeah.

Presenter2:32

How many copies are out there and how many have you clapped eyes on?

Sir Gregory Doran2:34

Well, I have to say my sister Jo said to me, Let me get this straight, Greg, you're trying to see over two hundred copies.

Sir Gregory Doran2:42

Of the same book.

Speaker 12:45

When you put it right back.

Sir Gregory Doran2:46

So this is Shakespeare's first fairy, the first time that his collected works were were put together by seven years after his death by two friends, John Hemmings and Henry

Sir Gregory Doran2:56

And if we didn't have the first folio, we wouldn't have half of Shakespeare's plays. No Macbeth, no Julius Caesar, no Tempest, no As You Like It, no Twelfth Night. So it's a very important book. And in 2023, we were celebrating the 400th anniversary of it. So I thought, well, I'm going to go and see as many as I can. And our copy in Stratford had its own amazing story because.

Sir Gregory Doran3:22

We nearly gave it away to the Pope.

Sir Gregory Doran3:26

Which is a comedy of Eris in itself. And I thought, well, if that's our story, then there may be other interesting stories that are.

Presenter3:27

It's a comedy of errors in itself.

Presenter3:33

That was in the 60s, Greg. We should say it had been presented to him to best and there was a misunderstanding. How many exist, and how many have you seen?

Sir Gregory Doran3:35

Correct.

Sir Gregory Doran3:36

It has a misunderstanding.

Sir Gregory Doran3:40

We think there may be seven hundred and fifty originally printed, possibly more than that. There is one census that says there are two hundred and twenty eight, but now there are two hundred and twenty nine because

Presenter3:55

Uh

Sir Gregory Doran3:55

Uh

Presenter3:55

It was the actual one.

Sir Gregory Doran3:56

I found another whale.

Presenter3:57

Possibly where did you find it?

Sir Gregory Doran3:58

It's a long story, but I did meet somebody who happened to say to me, Oh, you should come and see mine.

Sir Gregory Doran4:07

And they had a folio which they had not declared as it were. And it was a wonderful thing to see. But they are all over the world. So there are mostly in the States. Most of those are at the Folger Library in Washington. There are folios in Japan. And the furthest flung ones are in South Africa, in Australia, and in New Zealand.

Presenter4:29

You like the scruffy ones though, don't you?

Sir Gregory Doran4:30

I like the ones that have been written all over and show evidence of readership. There's one in West Virginia.

Sir Gregory Doran4:39

At the end of Hamlet somebody has written in the margin, in a seventeenth century hand, I do desire the reader's mouth To kiss the writer's ass.

Sir Gregory Doran4:53

Not sure I'm allowed to say that on the BBC, but anyway, that's what it was. They just take you into the moment of people r reading these plays for the first time and and being obsessed and interested by them. And sometimes those stories are not easy. Two folios

Sir Gregory Doran5:07

and the one in South Africa and the one in Auckland were presented by the same colonial governor, George Gray.

Sir Gregory Doran5:14

on the basis that they proved the superiority of the English language and therefore justified the suppression of of native Aboriginal languages. So there's a real conflict in the sense of Shakespeare as a colonial imposition and Shakespeare as a vital contemporary voice.

Presenter5:35

You're sharing your music with us today, Greg. I wonder how important that is to you. Obviously, vital in theatre productions. What about in life offstage?

Sir Gregory Doran5:43

Yeah, it's been very important to productions. It was certainly part of my life with my partner, my husband, Tony Scher. He would have the music on whenever he was painting or drawing or

Presenter5:54

Did you like the same things?

Sir Gregory Doran5:56

We allowed each other to share our our own, you know, particular obsessions, I guess.

Presenter6:02

Well, I think we'd better get started. Tell us about your first disc.

Sir Gregory Doran6:05

So this

Sir Gregory Doran6:07

This is the most exquisite duet from Handel, and to me.

Sir Gregory Doran6:14

It celebrates diversity, it celebrates difference, because it's from his opera Giulia Cesare, and it's a male and a female voice. But I suspect you may not immediately distinguish which voice is which. It is the moment when Cornelia Pompey's widow and her stepson Sesto lament the death of Pompey.

Sir Gregory Doran6:41

It's plungent, beautiful Baroque music, but the way those two voices interact is exquisite. One is the counter tenor Philippe Jaruski, and the other is the the pure contralto voice in a line that goes back to Kathleen Ferrier, who my mum loved, which is Natalie Stewartsman.

Sir Gregory Doran7:10

But we like the

Sir Gregory Doran7:15

In a trade or comes for it more.

Sir Gregory Doran7:21

Osmber Son was Muslim.

Speaker 27:55

Muslim period

Speaker 27:59

Oh sleep, peace.

Presenter8:03

Sonata allagrima from Handel's Julius Caesar sung by Nathalie Stutzmann and Philippe Jaruski with the Orfeo Fifty Five Orchestra.

Presenter8:12

So let's go back to the beginning, Sir Gregory Doran. You were born, along with your twin Ruth, in 1958 to parents John and Margaret. Which of the two of you arrived first?

Sir Gregory Doran8:22

I did, apparently, though I was told later by B. Bandele that in Yoruba culture

Sir Gregory Doran8:28

The oldest one sends the youngest one out first to look around and check it's okay before they So for years I suffered from being the oldest of the twins and my sister Ruth got all the advantages. And it n it didn't have to be like that.

Presenter8:43

Being a twin obviously a very special thing. I mean, do the two of you share a close bond still?

Sir Gregory Doran8:49

Very close. I'm very close with all my siblings in fact. And Ruth married a Tony, funnily enough, and our lives have been parallel in different ways. She called her youngest Gregory, and it is a close relationship.

Presenter9:06

And it was your mum, I think, who was into amateur dramatics when she was younger. Uh did you ever see her perform?

Sir Gregory Doran9:11

She was a very ardent member of the Women's Institute.

Sir Gregory Doran9:15

And she was really the director. She was what would they call them the producer.

Sir Gregory Doran9:22

And the Women's Institute did wonderful jumble sales and flower shows, but every year they did an elderly people's party and a concert, which she would

Sir Gregory Doran9:32

I guess direct.

Sir Gregory Doran9:33

The ladies would sing medleys of popular songs, and then at the end

Sir Gregory Doran9:39

We would go dark, the curtains would go back.

Sir Gregory Doran9:41

And there was a fluorescency.

Sir Gregory Doran9:43

And the first one was a garden theme, an English country garden, and there were two statues in the centre in white on plinths, and all the assembled ladies in there, dressed as flowers, in their fluorescent costumes. And then below me, the two characters on the plinth suddenly came to life. The statues came to life. They stepped down off their plinths and they danced together. And I thought, what's better than that? Magic. Magic. That was mum's influence and dad's influence. Dad was a chemist, a scientist by trade. He had worked at ICI and was headhunted to join United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in Preston, which is how we moved to Preston.

Sir Gregory Doran10:30

And he loved music and he

Sir Gregory Doran10:33

Would get box sets of sort of Beethoven symphonies. I think he was part of a thing called the World Record Club. I mean, he didn't know anything about it, but he he wanted to learn, so he would get these.

Speaker 110:42

So

Sir Gregory Doran10:44

And along with one of them came this 45 rpm record of the incidental music to Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Sir Gregory Doran10:53

And it had interspersed between the music extracts from the plays with an American cast. And I remember Puck was played by a woman. I thought she sounded exactly like Mickey Mouse, this was the thing. And she said, I'll put a girdle round about the earth in 40 minutes. And I thought, that's amazing. And then there was this story of forests and fairies and people with donkeys' heads and people who get drugged by flowers. I mean, what's not to love?

Presenter11:27

So, your passions were in evidence quite young then. Tell me more about you as a little boy. What kind of kid were you? Creative?

Sir Gregory Doran11:32

And if you can

Sir Gregory Doran11:33

My passion was wild animals and African animals at that. There was a show on the telly called Daktari, which was about a vet in Africa. I built a game reserve in my back garden. I had

Presenter11:47

Near Preston.

Sir Gregory Doran11:48

Near Preston. This is in Hutton, outside Preston. And we had an old chicken run in part of the back garden. And I spent all my pocket money on little African animals from the toy shop in Preston. So there was a sort of savannah bit where the elephant was and the giraffe was and the ostrich. And then there was a swampy bit, courtesy of the garden hose, where the hippo was and the crocodile was. And then in the corner, I built a volcano with rocks from my mum's rockery and stuffed in old leaves and licked the leaves so it actually smoked.

Presenter12:26

This is quite an intricate stage that

Sir Gregory Doran12:27

It is. It's a you know, I've I've never actually thought of that. And the gorilla lived up in the Dockleaves on the volcano. So I had my own African g games reserve, you know, at the age of eight.

Presenter12:40

Miss Ansen, ready to go. Ready to go. Well, on that note, I think we'd better have some music, Greg. Disc number two, what have you got for us?

Sir Gregory Doran12:46

Well, at the same time as Dactari came out, a film arrived at the ABC in Fishergate in Preston, and my parents took me to see it, and it changed my life. And the music for the film, the score, was by John Barry, who later wrote all those, well, I think who had already written all those James Bond themes and things. I bought the record and the sheep music. So this is Born Free, sung by the golden voice of Matt Monroe.

Sir Gregory Doran13:22

Born free As free as the wind blows

Speaker 213:30

Uh

Speaker 213:30

Yeah. As free as the grass grows, Ball free to follow your heart.

Speaker 213:42

Live free.

Speaker 213:45

And the beauty surrounds you.

Presenter13:50

Uh

Speaker 213:50

The world

Presenter13:51

Matt Munro and Born Free. Sir Greg Doran, tell me about your school days. You went to Preston Catholic College.

Sir Gregory Doran13:59

It was run by the Jays, by the Jesuits, and 900 boys, and it was very intimidating when I first arrived.

Presenter14:06

Why? What was intimidating?

Sir Gregory Doran14:07

Well, I had flat lancashire A's and flat lancashire vowels, but I didn't speak like the rest of them did, pretty much. And so they just thought I was posh. And it took a while, and it was actually Shakespeare that came to the rescue, because my twin sister went to the convent of the Holy Child Jesus in Winkley Square, across the road, but the girls were never invited to be in the plays.

Presenter14:33

Ah, there was no mingling.

Sir Gregory Doran14:34

Namingly. To my advantage.

Sir Gregory Doran14:37

And there was an annual Shakespeare play directed by a wonderful English teacher for whom I'm fill ever be grateful called Jock Malone.

Sir Gregory Doran14:48

And in the second year I missed out on playing Ophelia. It went to Gaggs Ronson, may he rot in hell.

Presenter14:58

Yeah.

Sir Gregory Doran15:00

But in the third year, I managed to land the role of Lady Anne in Richard III. To begin with, I thought to myself, This is just going to make the bullying worse because I'm going to be standing there in a dress and saying all these lines. So I was the third year, and Richard III himself was played by this sixth former in the second year six called Edwards. We only called each other by our surnames. Edwards looked like Mark Bolan. I mean, he was T-Rex, and he was glamorous and sexy, and he had to kiss me.

Sir Gregory Doran15:33

When he had to kiss my hand, I then had to respond by spitting him at him in the face.

Presenter15:39

Because Lady Anne's quite dynamic at Carrie.

Sir Gregory Doran15:41

I didn't think

Sir Gregory Doran15:43

The fact of not only spitting at a sixth former, but of standing there and saying lines of Shakespeare and not falling over gained me a kind of respect, and the bullying stopped like that. I suddenly, you know, it was like suddenly I could do something that earned some kind of respect. So I have a lot to thank Shakespeare for in my life.

Presenter15:56

I suddenly

Presenter16:04

Yeah.

Sir Gregory Doran16:04

That was one of them.

Presenter16:04

Shakespeare to the rescue again.

Sir Gregory Doran16:06

So they were very, very supportive of my parents. I can't pretend that they weren't. And they allowed me to do some kind of fairly crazy things. You know, the Shakespeare play wasn't enough for me. And in our summer holidays, I press ganged my friends into putting on more Shakespeare plays. I had a great friend called Richard Sharples. And one wet Saturday afternoon, we were poking around Astley Hall, which is an old Jacovean manor in the centre of Astley Park in Chorley. And I just thought this is a wonderful space. And we went into the courtyard and I thought, well, we should do a Shakespeare play here. And we did. And I got all of 16 managed to persuade Chorley Town Council to give us £13 for costumes.

Presenter16:50

You called yourselves the poor players.

Sir Gregory Doran16:51

The poor players, I know. That's n there's an irony there. And I think we were probably pretty poor. But nevertheless we had entrepreneurial flair. And Richard and I used to hitchhike down to Stratford. We loved show business.

Presenter17:07

It's time to go to the music. It's disc number three. What are we going to hear next and why are you taking this one to the island?

Sir Gregory Doran17:13

Richard and I were apart from being in the school plays, we were in the school choir. And it was a a very ambitious school choir. It was run by a wonderful man called Harry Duckworth.

Sir Gregory Doran17:27

And he used to get us to perform and compete indeed in Eistedforths, like Pontre Vendigai and Clangothelin. And we even auditioned for Huey Green on Opportunity Knox, in fact. We did a tour of America and we made a record. The repertoire was mostly sort of English folk songs and spirituals and hymns, but Harry Dockworth also introduced us to English sacred music. So music of bird and talis, of the Spanish Renaissance composer Da Vittoria and his Italian counterpart Palestrina. So I'm sure, Lauren, there are better recordings of this particular piece. But this is for Richard, who fifty two years later is still my very best friend. And we are singing the treble line in Palestrina's Sikut Cervus.

Sir Gregory Doran18:26

What trilogues they see in the chats.

Speaker 218:34

Singer on shall come.

Speaker 218:48

Let's see the Lord.

Sir Gregory Doran18:50

The world just to make your Lord God.

Speaker 219:07

The world

Speaker 219:12

We see the

Presenter19:21

Secret Chervas by Palestrina, with you and your friend Richard in the treble section of the Choir of Preston Catholic College, conducted by Harry Duckworth. What's it like for you hearing that back, Greg?

Sir Gregory Doran19:34

is rather

Sir Gregory Doran19:36

Nostalgic actually, because just being part of making that glorious sound.

Presenter19:43

No.

Sir Gregory Doran19:44

Uh That brilliant polyphony, to me that was what God sounded like.

Presenter19:44

Uh

Presenter19:48

And what was it like going to America as a teenager? I mean, that must have been incredible.

Sir Gregory Doran19:53

It was. I remember arriving in New York and and in the pouring rain and there smoke coming up from the vents in the in the middle of the road and there being cockroaches in the hotel and I remember thinking, I wonder

Presenter20:03

Wanna go home?

Sir Gregory Doran20:06

But no, we had a fantastic time.

Presenter20:09

So, Greg Doran, after school, you went on to study English and drama at Bristol University. Now, at that point, did you want to act, or had you started to think about directing?

Sir Gregory Doran20:20

Of both, my parents had very wisely said, you know, if the theatre is what you want to do, get yourself a degree to fall back on. And even my headmaster, Father Wren, in the only piece of career advice that any of my friends at the Catholic College ever remember getting, was he said to me, We're going to put you in for the Oxbridge exams, but because you do nothing but Shakespearean plays

Sir Gregory Doran20:49

Maybe you should think about doing English and drama at university. And I puffed and puffed and then I thought, well, I went to Bristol. I fell in love with the place and I thought that was a great experience. And I read a piece of Flaubert, who says that most people end up in life doing what they do second best. And I thought, what do I do? I loved acting.

Sir Gregory Doran21:13

But I knew that actually directing was

Sir Gregory Doran21:17

For me, a much better job, much better role, because you had a view of the whole thing, and I loved that.

Speaker 121:24

Mm.

Sir Gregory Doran21:26

So I decided that I would be a director, and then, lo and behold, I get a letter from the Royal Shakespeare Company asking me to audition for the nineteen eighty seven season.

Presenter21:37

Well, I want to come to that next. But first, I need some more music. Disc number four. What's next?

Sir Gregory Doran21:38

The first.

Sir Gregory Doran21:43

So I told you I'd been brought up by the Jesuits as a strong, devout Catholic family. I'm named after my uncle, who was a Benedictine abbot.

Sir Gregory Doran21:52

I felt this sense of a Catholic faith.

Sir Gregory Doran21:55

But I also knew that from as early as I could remember I was gay. I knew that in my soul.

Sir Gregory Doran22:02

And as I went to university, the Catholic Church, the Pope, came out with a

Sir Gregory Doran22:08

encyclical of some kind, in which he said that homosexuals were intrinsically disordered. And I remember that being like a f a slap in the face. It's interesting I can remember the phrase so distinctly, that I was I was intrinsically disordered.

Sir Gregory Doran22:25

And I had gone to university, I had lost my virginity along with those flat Lancashire vowels, I had fallen in love. And I thought this cannot be wrong. And I felt rejected by the faith in which I had been brought up. This is 1979. The first gay kiss on television is for another decade, and that was a rather chaste peck on EastEnders. The AIDS crisis hits in the early 80s, and so there was a lot in terms of coming out and identifying as gay at that time was really hard.

Speaker 122:46

To the end.

Presenter22:59

And were you out? Did you

Sir Gregory Doran23:00

I did because I'd fallen in love, because I had decided that I felt so angry about being called intrinsically disordered when I knew I was intrinsically homosexual. So I came out to my friends first, to my family, and I thought, well, I'm not going to hide this. I'm in love with this guy. I'm going to celebrate it. So.

Speaker 123:09

Uh

Presenter23:19

And were your family supporting the family?

Sir Gregory Doran23:21

They were, frankly.

Sir Gregory Doran23:23

I had played.

Sir Gregory Doran23:25

All these girls at school.

Presenter23:26

The clues were there.

Sir Gregory Doran23:28

The clues were there. But it was a big decision and even my very best friends who I came out to didn't immediately then come back and say, yes, I'm gay too. At least two of them were. And even when I admitted it, they couldn't admit it. So it was a tough time. And so this record, I think I'll need something to dance to on the island. And I wasn't a great clubber, but I did love dancing. And this, in a way, felt it was about the celebration of the energy of that gay community. So this came out in 1982. I have to say it was 2014 when a UKIP politician blamed the terrible flooding in the UK on the fact that the government were allowing gay managers, the UK was suffering all this flooding. So this is, of course, the weather girls singing, It's Raining Men.

Presenter23:30

Yeah.

Presenter23:42

No.

Speaker 123:42

Uh

Speaker 224:30

We got news for you. You better listen. Get ready for your lonely girls and leave those umbrellas at home. Alright.

Speaker 224:43

I'm just getting low girl according to all sources.

Speaker 224:54

Just tonight for the first time.

Presenter24:59

The Weather Girls and It's Raining Men.

Presenter25:04

So Sir Gregory Doran, you got your big career break when you first joined the RSC. It was nineteen eighty seven and you were an actor there at first. What was it like walking into that institution for the first time, not as an audience member who'd hitchhiked there to see a play, but as a member of the company?

Sir Gregory Doran25:22

It was the most uh extraordinary experience because the company itself were extraordinary.

Sir Gregory Doran25:29

There was Brian Cox and Harriet Walter and Fiona Shaw, and this quite famous by then actor called Anthony Scherr.

Presenter25:39

Yes, about him. Your very first role. You were playing Solanio and the Merchant of Venice, one of the salads. I think those roles are referred to the salad roles. And Anthony Scher was playing Shylock. Now, the two of you would go on to spend many happy years together. You would get married eventually. But tell me about your first impressions of him.

Sir Gregory Doran25:59

Well, there's a scene in The Merchant where the the s the salads taunt a Shylock. The scene was that I had to you know, we were basically beating him up with sticks.

Sir Gregory Doran26:10

And in the middle of that scene

Sir Gregory Doran26:14

Shylock delivers the the astonishing speech, Hath not a Jew eyes.

Speaker 126:19

Uh

Sir Gregory Doran26:20

And he exploded with this sort of volcanic white hot intensity, and it was amazing to just be that close to it. And indeed, once we started performing, to be there every night.

Sir Gregory Doran26:35

basically just fell in love with him.

Presenter26:37

Tony was from South Africa, and the two of you were active in the anti apartheid movement. In nineteen ninety five, you directed Tony in the lead role of Titus Andronicus in Johannesburg. What was that experience like and how did the play connect with the audience?

Sir Gregory Doran26:51

It was astonishing. It was a rough ride, I have to say. And this was Tony appearing for the first time as an actor in his own home country. So it was a big deal. And there is a line at the end. It's a very violent play, but somehow the violence in that play, instead of seeming gratuitous and sort of grandignol as it can in modern productions.

Sir Gregory Doran27:13

We had to honour the violence because this was a country which had invented necklacing, you know, the process of throwing a burning rubber tyre over somebody and executing them. And at the beginning of the rehearsals we went round the room asking everybody what their experience of violence was and

Sir Gregory Doran27:30

Whereas if you'd done that in the UK, somebody would have said, oh yeah, I know somebody was mugged or whatever. In South Africa...

Speaker 127:35

In

Sir Gregory Doran27:37

The violence was extreme. The girl playing Lavinia, the character has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out. She had researched it by going to meet somebody who'd had their tongue cut out and somebody who'd had their hands chopped off. So it was an extraordinary experience. But at the end of the play, Marcus Andronicus, Titus' brother, turns to the audience and says, Oh, let me teach you how to knit again this scattered corn into one mutual sheaf. So the play became about breaking cycles of violence. It became about reconciliation.

Presenter28:11

And did you get to meet Mandela?

Sir Gregory Doran28:13

I did. I did. We met when Mandela came to the UK and it was in South Africa House, the very place that we had protested outside for so long. And there he was, and I remember being introduced to him and thinking of all the questions I wanted to ask this man about Shakespeare, for instance, because he had signed a copy of Shakespeare on Robin Island. I wanted to ask him about that, but all I could do was sort of burble. And I remember him taking my hand and putting his hand on top of mine and of my whole metabolism, you know, going down and just becoming calm, as if he was just saying, for the moments we are together, I am totally focused on you. I thought the man was astonishing. And I danced on the stage with Desmond Tutu and Tony and I listened to Hugh Masakela, the father of South African jazz, playing jazz in Kippies, the bar outside the market theatre. It was just a glorious, glorious time. It felt that we were doing a tiny little bit to create a little bit of justice in the world, in a way.

Presenter29:21

I think we should have some music, don't you? What do we hear?

Sir Gregory Doran29:24

Well, this is of course celebrating that time, and it is the great Lady Smith Black Mambazzo singing with Paul Simon on his seminal, if controversial, album, Graceland, and this is Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.

Speaker 229:43

She's a rich girl, she don't try to hide it. Diamonds on the soles of her shoe He's a poor boy, empty as her pocket, empty as her pocket with nothing to lose. Sing ta-na-na-na, ta-na-na-na. She got diamonds on the soles of her shoes.

Speaker 130:03

Empty as a

Speaker 230:12

Yeah.

Presenter30:13

Diamonds on the soles of her shoes. Paul Simon featuring Lady Smith Black Mambazo.

Presenter30:19

Greg, you and Tony went on to work together many times. You were known as G and T to your friends. How did you manage working together professionally and being a partnership, being together at home? I mean, what were the boundaries?

Sir Gregory Doran30:32

We had to make very specific boundaries because we got it wrong, actually, in on Titus Andronicus. And I would get home and I would just need a gin and tonic and sit in the garden.

Sir Gregory Doran30:45

The trouble is you lose your best friend if you're directing them you s or or being directed by them I guess. You lose the person where you can go home and go, Oh my god, how you know, that person in rehearsals is driving me mad or whatever.

Presenter30:57

Whatever.

Sir Gregory Doran31:00

But well, we decided that we would when we were at home we'd not try not to talk about work.

Presenter31:06

You mentioned that Robin Island edition of Shakespeare's complete works that had been annotated by Nelson Mandela, and I think that inspired a production that you worked on in twenty twelve of Julius Caesar. Tell me the story behind that. How did it come together?

Sir Gregory Doran31:20

Tony and I had discovered that on Robin Island the inmates had a copy of Shakespeare.

Sir Gregory Doran31:30

It was owned by an Indian inmate mate called Sonny Van Karatnam, and Sonny's wife had covered it with Diwali cards to disguise it, because you weren't allowed literature in the prison. You could have a prayer book. So it was handed around at night, and various ANC inmates signed their favourite line. Mandela had signed Julius Caesar's lines, where he says, Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end,

Sir Gregory Doran32:14

will come when it will come.

Sir Gregory Doran32:16

So that's what I wanted to ask Mandela about when I met him and didn't. And I got a group of friends who were actors, black actors, together to go, with this work, let's just try it. Indeed, when we started rehearsing it, the Arab Spring was unfolding throughout North Africa. And the question was not.

Sir Gregory Doran32:37

Are they going to get Gaddafi? The question was going to be what happens next? Having Patterson Joseph as Brutus, Adua Ando as Porsche, the play just came alive in a different way. It wasn't, you know, sandals and togas. It had a kind of vitality and an energy which was extraordinary.

Presenter32:57

Let's have some more music, Greg. It's your sixth choice today. What's next and why are you taking it with you to the island?

Sir Gregory Doran33:03

So I felt at that juncture in my life, I felt a very lucky guy. And whatever happened next, I had been with the love of my life, I had been working on the greatest plays ever written with the greatest classical theatre company in the world, working with some spectacular talent. And I thought, you know, this is really about my gratitude and I guess my privilege at having that opportunity. So I've chosen Bach's Cantata. This is written for candlemass. So this is the moment when Mary and Joseph bring the child Jesus into the temple and St. Simeon takes the child in his arms and he says, I have enough, that God has allowed him to live to that point and that is enough in his life. So this is Bach's Cantata Ichabegenug, sung ravishingly by Thomas Kvastov.

Speaker 134:55

Probably high.

Presenter35:17

Ich Habegenoek by J. S. Bach, performed by Thomas Kwastoff and the Berlin Baroque soloists, conducted by Rainer Kusmoll.

Presenter35:25

I've got to ask you about directing Hamlet at the RSC, Greg. You cast David Tennant in the title role and in another first used a real human skull for Yorick. Now, this skull had been at the RSC for many years, but until you chose to cast him, it'd been in the props cupboard. How come?

Sir Gregory Doran35:44

A Polish-born composer called Andrey Tchaikovsky, who lived in Oxford.

Sir Gregory Doran35:50

He had bequeathed his skull.

Sir Gregory Doran35:54

to the R S C to be used in Hamlet as Yorick.

Sir Gregory Doran35:58

I had heard this story, and indeed the props master then told me the story of this Delcie tissue box arriving in the props store.

Sir Gregory Doran36:11

And them opening it up, at which point Krusty, the prop shop dog, went mad because this skull stank. So they put it up in an onion bag on the roof, and I guess the birds and the weather did the rest of the job. So by the time I looked at it, I thought, well, has nobody ever used this? And nobody had. So I said to David, look, one of the things about doing a play as famous, and you know, somebody once said, Hamlet is just full of quotations. One of the difficulties is how do you fresh mint those? How do you make them sound as though that character has just thought of them, that it's just come from the working house of thought? It's so easy for one of the most famous lines in the play, alas poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio, to be a cliché.

Speaker 136:43

Make them sad.

Sir Gregory Doran36:58

But if it's a real skull in your hand

Sir Gregory Doran37:02

That is almost impossible to do. So on the first day of rehearsals, I had introduced everybody. Penny Downey is playing Gertrude, Patrick Stewart is playing Claudius, and this, and I opened this box and I put on these purple plastic gloves and I said, and this is Andre, and he will be playing Yorick. Nobody.

Sir Gregory Doran37:24

had seen a real skull close up to.

Speaker 137:27

Hmm.

Speaker 237:27

Yeah.

Sir Gregory Doran37:28

So I offered it around the room for people to look at if they wanted to. And I said to Sisberry, our voice guru, all of ninety at that point, I asked her if she'd like to hold it, and she said, No, darling, I'm too close to that already.

Sir Gregory Doran37:44

It was a very special thing. And in fact, when we then filmed that show in a Jesuit seminary in Mill Hill for the BBC, nobody was paid any huge amounts of money. We all had to take them to the tube. There were no taxes, except for Andre. And Andre

Sir Gregory Doran38:03

Had a taxi that brought him all the way from Stratford-on-Avon to Mill Hill and took him back at the end of the show.

Presenter38:07

I took him back

Presenter38:09

Quite right too. Travelling in style.

Presenter38:12

It's time for some more music, Greg Doran. What's your next choice going to be?

Sir Gregory Doran38:16

I had become the artistic director, and we were having a great time. I was running through the canon.

Sir Gregory Doran38:27

We had filmed every one of them, it was all going very well, and then Covid struck.

Sir Gregory Doran38:35

And I had an amazing team around me at Stratford. They were resilient, they were innovative, they were inventive. The whole world suffered from COVID. What I didn't know when we locked down was that my life would change forever. And Tony was suddenly diagnosed with cancer, with terminal liver cancer. They said probably five years. This was in the June. By the September, that had dwindled to six months. And I said six months from the diagnosis or six months from where we are now, and they couldn't tell me. And I took compassionate leave from the job, and it was exactly six months from the diagnosis to the day of his funeral. And he died in my arms.

Sir Gregory Doran39:37

At the beginning of December.

Sir Gregory Doran39:41

And he disappeared from my life and it was like it was like being torn in two.

Sir Gregory Doran39:48

We had always regarded each other as sort of

Sir Gregory Doran39:52

The other half of ourselves. And we were G and T in the family, and I didn't know who G was without T. But we had time. We had not enough time, there couldn't be enough time, but we had time to say everything we needed to say. We tried to stay in the now. Shakespeare says at one point, now, now, very now. Well, we were only interested in the now, now, very now-ness of things. And one of the things that sustained us was music through that time. And so, this is a piece of music that we played a lot. So, this is the Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, played by Alfred Brendel.

Presenter41:42

Part of the Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. twelve in A major, played by Alfred Brendel and the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter41:53

Greg Doran, Shakespeare's language has been such a immense source of consolation for so many people going through indescribable circumstances. I mean, that's probably why Roy Plumley insisted that each castaway should have the complete works on their desert island.

Speaker 142:07

Tell me.

Presenter42:09

I wonder which passages you've turned to since losing Tony, and are there any that you've avoided? Because you must hear him and feel him everywhere.

Sir Gregory Doran42:20

People were fantastically kind to me when Tony died. It was a huge outpouring of love and respect for his talent. And the fact that when I took compassionate leave, the story was out, and people wrote about him in the press, and he would go, I'm reading my obituaries. And I said, Yeah, but they're five-star raves. So don't worry. In Richard II, there's a moment when the Duchess of Gloucester says about grief. She says, For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done.

Sir Gregory Doran42:54

And I think that was something that was hard for people to understand in a way, that you know, you looked fine and you were doing stuff and and yet you were still falling apart in inside.

Sir Gregory Doran43:08

He had written a diary, as he always had written diaries, so he was very familiar with writing about his life and his work.

Sir Gregory Doran43:18

And so I said to him, Are you going to write about this? Not just a diary. Are you going to write about this? And he did, and he wrote um what he called uh the dying diaries.

Sir Gregory Doran43:30

He told me he wanted me to read them and for two years I just couldn't do it. And after having seen 200 folios, I came home and I thought, right, I'm going to read them. I was afraid of reading them because I was afraid of going back to that place, of feeling guilty that I hadn't

Sir Gregory Doran43:52

been able to help him, that I had you know, he had died happily, at home, peacefully, but somehow I still hadn't been able to save him, as it were. Reading the diaries, his voice came back into the room, and his laughter, and I had forgotten how much we laughed.

Speaker 143:54

Duh.

Sir Gregory Doran44:11

Philip Larkin says that what will survive of us is love and I now know that to be true. So the grief has gone through all the various stages that they say it'll go through, and every person dil finds that journey different. But for me

Sir Gregory Doran44:32

The recognition of being blessed with what I had. We had thirty-five years together.

Presenter44:40

Ooh.

Sir Gregory Doran44:41

And they were full of love and laughter and life.

Presenter44:44

I know that you scattered Tony's ashes in Stratford.

Sir Gregory Doran44:44

Uh

Presenter44:48

Had you talked about what what you were planning to do?

Sir Gregory Doran44:50

Yes, we had. The claws of COVID were still everywhere.

Sir Gregory Doran44:55

His family were not able to come from South Africa. So in the January, once COVID had lifted, I took half of his ashes to Cape Town and we scattered them off Big Rock, which was on the beach at the end of the road where he grew up in Sea Point. We scattered him into the ocean. I had scattered the other half on Shakespeare's birthday at six o'clock in the morning. I had gone down to the Avon and poured them into the Avon to flow past the theatre where we'd worked together, flow past the church where Shakespeare's buried, and across over the Weir and away. And that's how I would like to follow him. Thank you very much.

Presenter45:40

Well, not just yet, though, because you have one challenge ahead at least, which is being cast away by us on a desert island. I wonder if studying the Tempest, spending time with that text has taught you anything about surviving.

Sir Gregory Doran45:41

Oh

Sir Gregory Doran45:51

Listen, Lauren, this is going to be straightforward because this is Prospero's Island as far as I'm concerned. The isle is full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not, and I will have Ariel and all his quality on hand to do my every bidding. So I'll be fine.

Presenter46:09

You gonna be all right.

Sir Gregory Doran46:11

You know, I did build a game reserve, remember, on that chicken run.

Presenter46:14

You can knock up a chat.

Sir Gregory Doran46:15

Could lock up a shelter. You know, that would be a start. And then Ariel will help with the rest of it.

Presenter46:20

And what about the isolation? You've spent your life working and enjoying the company of others. You've talked about it so passionately today. How will you be on your own?

Sir Gregory Doran46:29

I

Sir Gregory Doran46:31

Have since Tony died. I think I've learnt the difference between loneliness and solitude.

Sir Gregory Doran46:38

So I'm okay in my with my own company. In the sun, I have my twin sister goes nut brown and I turn into a species of rhubarb. So I'm not looking forward to that bit. But

Presenter46:50

Gonna need the shade of a good palm tree.

Sir Gregory Doran46:51

Yeah, I think so.

Presenter46:53

I'm the same.

Presenter46:54

We'll let you choose one more disc before we cast you away. Your final choice today, please, Greg Doran. What's it going to be?

Sir Gregory Doran47:00

This, in a way, is a song about retirement. This is a song about imagining what's next. And it is, of course, Shakespeare. So it's from The Tempest. And it is Ariel's song as he contemplates his liberty. And he imagines on the bat's back I will fly after summer Merrily. And it is from my own production of The Tempest. Ariel is sung by the wonderful Mark Courtley, and it was composed by

Sir Gregory Doran47:35

My long term collaborator and great friend.

Sir Gregory Doran47:39

Paul English bee. So this is where the bee sucks, there suck I.

Sir Gregory Doran47:45

Where the bee socks they sock are

Sir Gregory Doran47:51

In a travel slips bell I lie

Sir Gregory Doran47:57

There I couch when owls do cry On the bat's back

Sir Gregory Doran48:04

I do flower

Sir Gregory Doran48:11

Where the bee sucks their sock up When a cow slips bare

Presenter48:20

Where the Bee Sucks Paul English Bee. So, Greg Doran, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'll give you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare.

Presenter48:29

You can take one other book with you. What will it be? Can I do a trade?

Sir Gregory Doran48:34

I would I'm very glad to have obviously the complete works of Shakespeare, but what I'd like is to have it in a first folio edition of sixteen twenty three, please.

Presenter48:43

You can have that, yes. Any particular first folio? No, you've seen a few.

Sir Gregory Doran48:47

Well, I've seen a few. It's radioactive, that book. And it's because people have poured over those texts thinking it brings you as close to Shakespeare as you're ever going to get. And so yeah, I'd like the the real thing, please.

Presenter49:01

I'm going to give you an enjoyably scruffy first volume.

Sir Gregory Doran49:04

Please do.

Presenter49:05

You can take one other book. What will that be?

Sir Gregory Doran49:08

The first folio doesn't include Shakespeare's sonnets.

Sir Gregory Doran49:12

which is a wonderful cycle of a hundred and fifty four sonnets, many of which I could reel off by heart, but

Sir Gregory Doran49:19

many which I have hardly read, and I would love to get to know those. So can I have a sixteen oh nine copy of Shakespeare's sonnets? There are only twelve in the world, but I promise I will look after it.

Presenter49:33

Oh, absolutely. And what about a luxury item? What do you fancy?

Sir Gregory Doran49:37

This is hard. I kind of thought in a toothbrush. And then I decided that.

Sir Gregory Doran49:45

When Tony and I first got together, I made a photograph album. It's one of those old photograph albums with black pages and plastic corners and beautiful hand-marbled paper on the covers. And I then made one for every year we were together. So there is a shelf of 35 albums that are full of sunshine and holidays and family and kids growing up and Tony and I and so I would like that shelf of photo albums. I would like it, if you wouldn't mind, providing a sort of air-conditioned, properly humidified

Speaker 149:55

Yeah.

Sir Gregory Doran50:32

container for them as well. That would be great so we don't get too soggy.

Presenter50:34

Certainly. We'll take the best of care of them. Very precious and they're definitely yours. And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today, Greg, would you rush to save from the waves first?

Sir Gregory Doran50:45

It would have to be the Mozart piano concerto, and as Alfred Brendel.

Presenter50:45

Uh

Sir Gregory Doran50:51

recorded the complete piano concertos. Can I have the book said?

Presenter50:55

Now, Greg, I've been kind with the folio, I've been flexible there. You can have the whole piano concerto, but you can't have the box set, I'm afraid.

Sir Gregory Doran51:04

All right. Well, that's good enough for me.

Presenter51:08

Sir Greg Doran, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. It's been a great honour.

Presenter51:24

Hello, it was lovely chatting to Greg and I hope he's very happy on his island, looking at all those wonderful photo albums and of course reading plenty of Shakespeare. There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive that you can listen to including Sir Gregory's husband, the actor Sir Anthony Scher. Dame Judy Dench is in there too along with pianist Alfred Brendel. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or on our own Desert Island Disc's website. The studio manager for today's programme was Sarah Hockley. The executive production coordinator was Susie Roylence. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The content editor was Mugabe Turia and the producer was Sarah Taylor. Join me next time when my guest will be the gardener and broadcaster Carol Klein.

Speaker 152:30

From B

Presenter52:30

Uh

Speaker 152:30

BBC Radio Four.

Presenter52:32

The Russians will be launching a satellite sometime in the next three weeks. I'm Kim Cottrell, back with a new series of central intelligence.

Speaker 152:39

This is a CIA covert op top secret.

Presenter52:42

Uh

Speaker 152:42

The drama podcast that tells the history of the CIA from the inside out, starring Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, and me, Kim Cottrow.

Sir Gregory Doran52:51

Ms. Page, such a pleasure to meet a real American.

Speaker 152:55

Yeah.

Sir Gregory Doran52:55

Listen to Central Intelligence Series 2 first on BBC's

Presenter52:59

Sounds