Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor and director, founder of Northern Broadsides Theatre Company, known for staging classics with northern voices in non-traditional spaces.
On the island
Eight records
One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)
All the parties that we have known the broadsides in the 24 years we've been going. If this time arrives and I'm still up, I [always] sing this song, just 'cause I know the words. But like I've chosen my songs 'cause if you drop a pebble in the memory pool and all the ripples. And this is the memory of the last twenty-four years. And this encapsulates Northern Broadside.
And she used to sing this song, and this is the pebble of the few nice memories I have of being a little lad.
You can't be on a desert island without this voice. It is the voice of post war pop music, for me.
I was always a Stones fan. I was also a Chuck Berry fan, so I've made a compromise here. A Chuck Berry number sung by The Stones. It ain't the Stones' bestest, it ain't Chuck Berry's bestest, but together it's quite dynamic.
Symphony in D minor: III. Allegro non troppo
And then I heard this and I just fell in love.
I am a terrible insomniac and I used to sing to my girls, Bryony and Rowan, before they went to bed. So on this island I would love to be sung to sleep. And this is the lullaby that Eliza Carthy was sang to by [her mam Norman].
Proud MaryFavourite
It's a tribute to the ladies in my life, from the matriarchs when I were born, right through to the ladies of girlfriends, to dear ex-wife, to daughters, and to leading colleagues, all of whom have been female. And it's my sort of little nod and tribute by one of the great female rock and rollers.
I Don't Want to Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes
This is my rage against the dying of the light. I don't want to hang up my rock and roll shoes. This is a great version of [a] song which [has been] many people have recorded. And it's wonderful brass in the middle of it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:07What is it about you that has been, throughout times, impatient with the status quo?
This assumed scholarship. Where, you know, you sit round a table and discuss every bloody line and comma for a fortnight before you get on your feet. You know, rehearsals, first day, act one, scene one, get on your feet and let's get to work. It's that … the rock and roll of the big language … it is about music as well, the music of language. It's not about the last two hundred years, which has been the investigation into the mind and psychology and what is Cleopatra thinking – [who] anyone [cares]? Who gives a damn? [Shakespeare] didn't write that four hundred years ago. He knew actors he was writing for, he knew the place he was writing for, and he wrote theatre.
Presenter asks
6:04Would you say it's all about the story, not about actors tying themselves in knots over motivation?
Who gives a damn about any actor becoming somebody? That's not our job. Our job is to instil in an audience that what comes out of our gobs deserves to come out of them, and therefore then you do the work as the audience.
Presenter asks
8:00What else do you remember about your mother from those early years?
Well, I've got a very checkered history and my mum's still alive and I'm eldest of four boys, all to different fathers. And then seventeen years after the divorce to me dad in nineteen sixty six, she came back to [Hull] and married my dad again … and then got divorced again. So I've got my sort of rose-tinted glasses on a little bit.
The keepsakes
The luxury
at the first sign of madness I'll put em on swim out. Find a great white and challenge him to fifteen rounds.
Presenter asks
20:49You had a son, Harry, who died at fourteen weeks from cot death. [How did you cope?]
I was on stage at the National playing Napoleon in Peter Hall's Animal Farm, nineteen eighty four, and the [stage manager] knew just after the interval. … [The] stage manager came into the dressing room at the end and said there's been uh something wrong. I knew something was wrong 'cause she was smoking … But I never in the world thought it would be uh Harry. So I drove home … with the radio blaring all the time – I was wanting the police to stop me so I didn't have to drive and explain the situation … ten days later I was back at work on stage. … [People] often offer things … that old thing of … when Priam goes to Achilles' tent for the body of Hector, first they sit down for food and drink. It's that sort of ancient syndrome that you bring food and drink, and I never refused any. … I have a hole in me which will never get stitched up. It's a black hole. But next to it is the sun of the daughter that we now have.
Presenter asks
27:55What have the great parts [like King Lear] taught you about getting older?
Not a lot, because seventy now is a lot younger than when they were written, and certainly … my grandfather's age, or … my dad's age, seventy is a lot younger now. … I'm still putting on a fat suit and falling backwards into a basket seven times a week. As long as we don't lose our faculties, actors don't need to retire. I just hope I grow old gracefully with a bit of fun and a lot of rock and roll.
Presenter asks
28:31In 2009 you had a heart attack while directing in Estonia. What happened?
I was directing Richard the Third in Estonia. Luckily in Tartu, the second city, because it's got a university and a lovely clinic with it. So I had this heart attack. I didn't know it was a heart attack. It was a real pain across the top of my shoulders. And I was working for four days afterwards. And eventually my designer said, you're not right. Let's go to the clinic. So straight upstairs, intensive care, straight up to the surgery ward. So I was watching it all on the screen. He gets to the occluded artery and he said to me, Right, there it is, Mr. Rutter, on the screen, about an inch of occluded blood. He said, I've got to remove this very carefully now, so I don't send it round the body. It's not a five-minute job. And I said, well, Doc, I'm going nowhere. The pubs are short. He started laughing. And then very formally, he lifted his hands off my body, looked down at me and said, Mr. Rutter, don't make me laugh. I'm in your heart.
“I love the fact that it goes and it disappears and you learn from it, but you can't carry it with you because the next night audience is always new.”
“Who gives a damn about any actor becoming somebody? That's not our job. Our job is to instil in an audience that what comes out of our gobs deserves to come out of them, and therefore then you do the work as the audience.”
“I have a hole in me which will never get stitched up. It's a black hole. But next to it is the sun of the daughter that we now have.”
“I'm still putting on a fat suit and falling backwards into a basket seven times a week. As long as we don't lose our faculties, actors don't need to retire.”
“If I was psychoanalysing myself, that's what I would probably think, that I've sought families.”