Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Left-wing playwright and theatre director, author of Plenty, Pravda, and TV's Lichten Hitler; associate director, National Theatre.
On the island
Eight records
Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043 (1st movement)
Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta
the Bach double violin concerto. This is Isaac Stern's sixtieth birthday concert with Itzakh Perlman, and um I've chosen it because it's one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.
Young and FoolishFavourite
Frank Sinatra said of Mabel Mercer that he'd learnt everything he knew about phrasing from her.
String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135 (1st movement)
I loved the Beethoven Late Quartets, and we're going to have um the one in F.
...we've got to um turn the volume up and generally shake the birds out of the trees and um uh bop.
London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado
I believe John Williams, who wrote the music for Jaws, had to pay some money to the Stravinsky Estate because the two pieces were so similar, and so I thought it would be absolutely perfect for Shark Watch.
Teresa Stratas, New York City Y Chamber Symphony, Gerard Schwarz
Opera singers sing popular song extremely badly usually... But Theresa Stratas recently recorded some um Kurt Weill songs, and she's the rare example of an opera singer who can sing popular song. And in my view, she sings Weill better than Lotte Lenya did.
Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4
LaSalle Quartet, Donald McInnes, Jonathan Pegis
A great friend of mine is Wallace Shawn, the American playwright, and in one of his plays The Leading Lady describes this music as if Schoenberg is putting his hands inside my blouse and running them all over my body.
Mandy Patinkin, the great American lyric tenor, played a transsexual [in The Knife]... Unfortunately there's no cast recording of The Knife, so instead I have a piece from an LP that Mandy was making at the same time that he did The Knife, which was the LP of South Pacific, and here he sings Younger Than Springtime.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:39Did you always intend to be a playwright?
No, it came about by chance. What happened was that I was running a small theatre group. I thought I was going to be a theatre director. And I was travelling the country with something called Portable Theatre, which I started just after I left university. And we literally were without a play to do. A playwright had promised me a play, and he didn't deliver. And so in four days, I had to write one of my own. And so I knocked something together, a one-act play that took four days to write and lasted an hour. And it was handed by an agent that I instantly acquired to Michael Codron, who was and is now the most famous producer in the West End. And he then asked me to write a full-length play. So I found myself, without any intention at all, suddenly with a play on in the West End at the age of twenty-two, twenty-three.
Presenter asks
6:34But if you have so little control over [the writing] or knowledge of where it comes from, you must be terrified it might suddenly disappear tomorrow.
Absolutely. I [don't] know a writer who isn't terrified of that, and what's called writer's block is no more than that. It's just the fact that a writer accepts you cannot write by will. You can only write by impulse. And where that impulse comes from, I'm afraid, is mystical.
Presenter asks
9:19The keepsakes
The book
I'm going to have uh La Rousse Gastronomique, which is the um um Bible of French cookery and indeed now, happily, of of international cookery. The latest edition is just uh describes every possible meal.
The luxury
a piece of coconut matting, a cricket bat and a bowling machine
I'm going to turn the bowling machine up day by day and learn day after day to play ever faster bowling. So that when I return to England and go to the Lords Test match and um I'm sitting there and whoever in the England team has been uh caught with a barmaid or whatever the problem is, and they say is there anyone in the ground who can actually play West Indian fast bowling, I'm going to have not wasted my time on the desert island.
What did your father do for a living?
He was a sailor for eleven months of the year he was away, and he would arrive once a year unloading goods from the world, bringing back um frozen lamb from New Zealand, or pineapple chunks from Hawaii, or um toys from Hong Kong. And so he was a very romantic figure in my life, because he simply came and disgorged goods over us, and then left again.
Presenter asks
16:44Do you believe genuinely that the theatre can have a real effect on society?
I don't know if it does have an effect, but I know that the illusion that it has an effect is absolutely essential to me. I wouldn't want to work in it unless I believed that it was possible. It doesn't really matter to me whether it's true or not. I'm very aware in America, if I present a play, that there is very little chance of my ideas having much effect, because the society is so strong that to be a member of the society you have to believe certain things. In England, the door of self-doubt is already open. I don't have to kick it open. People have a sense that they may or may not be living in the right way, and they're willing to listen to people who want to tell them of maybe another way to live. And I know from the letters that I get that certain things that I've written have had a very profound effect on individuals' lives. I get letters saying that people have left their jobs, or people have left their wives, or people have left their husbands, because of things that I've written.
Presenter asks
22:59Why do you describe [success] as terror?
I think because you um you watch so many writers fail to write after they've um written something successful and they spend the next five years um lolling about. And I've always um had a fear of stopping writing.
Presenter asks
24:53How much do the critics affect you? Do you get hurt?
Yes, I think that it's a great joke among my production team that I'm temperamentally completely unsuited to a life in the theatre. And they all giggle during dress rehearsals because there's always a moment at which I disappear from the auditorium in order to go and be sick in the men's room because the thought that I am actually going to stop everybody in their daily life and say, now hold on, everybody, for the next two hours, 800 people are actually going to have to listen to me. I have never managed to get up to a first night without it actually making me ill. And so obviously when critics write mean things, I just don't have the temperament that can cope with it.
“For me, it's like ectoplasm. I sit down, I haven't the slightest idea whether I'm going to be able to write or not. I write, and then at the end of the day, I look at it, and I have very little idea where it's come from, and I have very little idea who wrote it.”
“Class displacement is a recurring theme in English writing in the twentieth century.”
“I wouldn't want to work in [the theatre] unless I believed that it was possible [to have a real effect on society]. It doesn't really matter to me whether it's true or not.”
“I accept the fact that there will always be a great swirl of controversy around these plays, that they will be attacked more vehemently than other people's plays, but that they will also have a profound effect on individuals.”
“I had a very happy experience with Plenty, where the critics certainly did make me cry. And then because Peter Hall was such a believer in the play, he kept it on at the National Theatre, where it played to very small houses because of the critical reception. And then it built its audience by word of mouth. And at the end, it was playing, after nine months, to standing ovations. And it was a success entirely created by the audience. And I think that for me was very liberating. And I thought, oh, I see, it doesn't actually matter what's said in the newspapers. What matters is what the audience thinks. And they can create their own successes.”
“I don't really believe that [childhood marks you]. I think all I have is I discovered by accident that I had a gift for writing dialogue. And once I discovered I had that, most of what I've written about has come from the ether. I don't really believe that it's come from my childhood.”