Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A very successful theatre and film director.
On the island
Eight records
Vienna State Opera Chorus and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Georg Solti
The first time I ever became aware of the the power of music to move me was I I was in the school choir and I got roped into singing with the school choir as part of the choir accompanying the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, singing the Vedi Requiem in Sherbourne Abbey...
Being a child of the fifties, or at least a a teenager in the fifties, I was and am deeply attached to rock and roll, in particular Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Presley. And this is a a Chuck Berry track which is called School Day. And apart from being wonderful rock and roll, it has the most delightful lyrics.
John Coltrane and Duke Ellington
My third record reflects my affection for jazz, which was really born when I was at Cambridge. And I came in contact with a number of extremely good undergraduate jazz musicians and made friends of several of them and started to listen regularly to a great deal of jazz.
Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 (Wedding Cantata): I. Adagio
Like most of the classical music that I've come to know, it's music that I first heard on the radio. And because I have no musical background, I keep discovering pieces of music that I subsequently discover are incredibly well known.
Billie Holiday with Teddy Wilson and His Orchestra
Matty Malneck and Frank Signorelli
I think one of the things that would happen on a desert island is that I would start to think a lot about love. And if I was thinking about love, then I would have to have somebody who sings about love in a matchless way, and that would be Billie Holliday.
The first film I directed for television was a film written by the novelist Ian McEwan called The Imitation Game... And there's a piece of music that is irrevocably connected in my mind with that film, which is a Mozart piano piece, the Fancia in C minor.
I would like to be on a desert island with the entire film of Singing in the Rain, and if I can't take the film, then at least I can take Gene Kelly's Singing in the Rain, and then I could learn to dance the routine in and out of the surf.
El Cant dels Ocells (The Song of the Birds)Favourite
It's called The Song of the Birds, and it's a tune that he played at the end of every concert. And it's a a Catalan folk song. He was an exile from Catalonia. He left when Franco took over in Spain, and he never returned to Spain.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:07What do you remember about your supervisor [Kingsley Amis] at Cambridge?
I had the good luck to have Kingsley Amis as my supervisor... And he was a breath of fresh air because he taught me that there were no received opinions about literature and the important thing was to work out for yourself what you thought about a piece of literature.
Presenter asks
5:06What was your ambition at that time [at Cambridge]?
I don't think I had a recognisable ambition. If anything, I wanted to be a a writer. I was beginning to be aware that I would never be a sufficiently good actor to satisfy my own criteria.
Presenter asks
9:33Looking back, what was your best piece of work in Scotland?
I would say two productions. One was a production of The Changeling, the Middletown play, Jacobean play. and the other was a production of The Cherry Orchard. I've always been obsessional and passionate about Chekhov's work...
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
Eric Partridge
apart from being an endlessly amusing read, it's also a mine of information about social history and derivation of language
The luxury
I bought a saxophone and I started to learn it and I got such vigorous protests from my family and the neighbours that after a fortnight I had to take the saxophone back to the shop and humiliatingly ask for my money back. So that I think on a desert island no one except for the monkeys would complain and it might even attract a passing ship or two.
What steps did you take about moving to London?
Well, I'd been at Nottingham for about five and a half years and was beginning to feel rather jaded and really looking for some kind of escape with honour... So I had out of the blue, I had an offer from BBC Television to take over as producer of Play for the Day.
Presenter asks
14:44How did you feel about moving to the National Theatre?
Yes, the Olivier Theatre is notoriously difficult cavern of a theatre to fill. I sat with um John Gunter, the designer, in this enormous quarry of a space when we were thinking of doing guys and dolls, thinking how on earth we could transform it into a a place of joy. And it was rather daunting.
“I'm afraid I'm one of those people for whom musak was invented. I have an unnatural fear of silence, and I'd marginally prefer silence to bad music, but only marginally.”
“I had a sort of experience the road to Damascus was just uh sitting in front of a a mirror attempting to put on this wildly implausible makeup prior to going on stage to um perform extremely badly in The Boyfriend. And I realized that there was no way that I could uh... Hold my head up in public again if I went on doing this.”
“I'm haunted by this tune for several reasons, one of which is that when he died I saw a film of him playing the piece to a United Nations gathering of statesmen and the wives of statesmen. And I was struck by the fact that most of the wives had tears pouring down their faces and most of the men remained a kind of granite indifference. And it seemed to me a wonderful metaphor for the way in which world power is not susceptible to the finer feelings.”