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Told by an Idiot's Artistic Director Paul Hunter in free-flowing conversation with friends and colleagues from the theatre industry, delving into what made them the people they are today.
PAUL: Hello and welcome to Regrets,
I've Had a Few.
I'm Paul Hunter, Artistic Director of Told
by an Idiot, and this is a podcast where I
talk to friends and colleagues,
delving into what made them
the person they are today.
Hello and welcome.
My guest this month is a theatre director
who has been at the heart of new writing
in the UK for the past 40 years.
His range is extraordinary,
from experimental work in studio spaces
to directing Hollywood
A Listers in London's West End.
His time as Artistic Director
of the Bush Theatre in the 1970s and 80s
was a golden period for the West London
hotbed of theatrical creativity.
And when he was Artistic Director
of Theatre Royal Plymouth,
he nurtured and supported a generation
of theatre makers, including us,
the Idiots, Frantic Assembly
and Shôn Dale-Jones.
He remains curious and it is always
a pleasure to chew the theatrical
fat with him over a glass of wine.
So I welcome my dear friend, Simon Stokes.
Thank you.
SIMON: Thank you very much.
Pleased to be here, Paul.
PAUL: You're very welcome, Simon.
I always say this when
I have a director as a guest.
I'm always intrigued by how much acting
the director in question
might have done in the past.
Now, I noticed - I don't know if we've
ever talked about this - but I noticed
that you trained at the
Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
SIMON: I did.
PAUL: My first question is, what course
did you take or study there, Simon?
SIMON: I took two courses.
The first was a Stage Management course.
A very, very good, one year course.
And the second was a Director's
course, also one year.
PAUL: Okay, that's interesting.
I will come back to the notion of acting
and your experience of acting
during the podcast.
But I'm also intrigued, just to
start us off on this,
am I right in thinking that for a while,
one of the main routes into directing
was through Stage Management?
Is that how some directors
became directors?
SIMON: Well, I did deliberately
because I didn't know how things worked,
which is why I went to the Old Vic School.
Nowadays, there's lots
of Assistant Directors.
That job did not exist back in the day.
So, yes, people came in,
sometimes via Stage Management, more often
via acting, even more often via Oxbridge.
PAUL: Of course, some things never change, Simon.
SIMON: Exactly.
PAUL: Now, we'll touch on that later,
but I always like to go
right back to the beginning.
So don't worry, I'm not looking for exact
memories, I'm just curious as to your
very early experiences of theatre.
Was that something at school or with your
family or when did you first encounter
it and what might it have been?
SIMON: Well, Paul, in some ways,
I was born into it.
That's because you say
theatre, not a theatre.
And my father was a Padre.
A Padre is a priest in the military,
the army in his case.
So there were already two branches
of theatre immediately thrust upon me.
One was the army and one was the church.
And so I grew up with all of that ritual
and costume and campness, and of course,
I was behind scenes throughout all
of it, well, often behind the scenes.
In the church, for instance,
I used to sing in the choir in whichever
place we were, and therefore we
were part of the cast, so to speak.
And it was also at a time of history,
this is back in the 50s/60s really,
where things were moving
fast and very dramatically.
So my father was...
We were going around the world,
closing the Empire, basically,
and there was a lot going
on and a lot of weirdness happening.
PAUL: That's very interesting.
That's a fantastic phrase.
It will definitely stick with me.
"We were going around the world,
closing the Empire". On
one level it sounds like you were closing
branches of WHSmiths or Woolworths.
SIMON: Well, it sort of was a bit
like that, I must say.
We were in Kenya twice, and the second
time it was Independence there.
We were in Tripoli in Libya twice,
and the British Army got out
of that the second time.
So my father was
deconsecrating the churches as well, or
handing them over to whoever, the locals.
And in Berlin, where we were,
it was the Russians who were
trying to close us down.
PUL: Wow. It's interesting when you say...
I remember a very early play that I did.
It might not have been a full production,
it might have been like a workshop
production of a play at the old Soho Poly,
do you remember the old Soho Poly?
SIMON: Yeah, indeed.
PAUL: And it was a play called Menacing The Boat
and it was about a family getting out of
Aden and you suddenly reminded me of it.
I remember that thinking it's
quite a fascinating play.
So when you were, I suppose,
moving around, I mean, I'm assuming,
perhaps you didn't go
to school in those places.
You were at school in England,
I'm assuming, or maybe I'm wrong.
SIMON: Yeah, I was at school
in the North of England.
Well, yes, from the age of eight.
PAUL: And did you encounter theatre
in some form at the school?
SIMON: Well, a range of plays and I was in them.
The main place I encountered my the early
part of theatre was actually
from my mother, who was a keen amateur,
but also in all of these places around
the world, she would every
year do a nativity play.
Quite a big production in the church
with choirs,
and this is the days of national Service
, so you could get some very bright,
very talented people who basically had
to do it because they were told to do it.
They volunteered, theoretically.
And, you know,
we had the Royal Chorus Signals doing
the communications and all
of that kind of stuff.
So that was my first,
I think, in Catholic camp,
I must have been six or something when I
first saw my mother's Nativity play and it
went on for two decades, probably more than that.
I didn't really go to a theatre that I can
recall until I was probably late
teens. Rep in Colchester,
where we ended up.
PAUL: What did you see?
SIMON: Oh, God knows.
Rep stuff.
When I was, I guess, 18,
I made a journey down from the North
to see Hair, the production of Hair, which
opened, I think, in something like 67.
You won't recall, you're way too young.
The Lord Chamberlain's Office was
abolished and therefore censorship
in the theatre was abolished.
And it's very weird to think
that there was such a thing,
but every time you put a play on,
you had to submit the play
to the Lord Chamberlain's Office,
and if they didn't like what was in it,
swearing or nudity, they would just say,
no, you can't do that.
They'd cross it out and send it back.
Very, very strange and relatively
recent in our history.
And the day after that was abolished,
Hair opened in the West End,
coming from New York, and it was, I mean,
a fantastic and eye opening thing.
I guess I went three
months after it was open.
And of course, it had, famously,
nudity in it,
which for those days was, you know,
amazing and shocking,
and it had great songs and it was
a hippie musical and of its time.
And it was very, very different
from anything I saw at Colchester Rep.
PAUL: Am I right in thinking,
I might have got this wrong,
but that Kenneth Tynan was
involved in some way with Hair?
Or have I got
that wrong? Or did he just review it?
SIMON: Do you know, that rings a slight bell.
He was, I think, well, later on, perhaps,
or maybe even at the time,
he was obviously Dramaturg,
I think he was later on,
at the National Theatre under Olivier,
but he was, of course,
a great critic wasn't he.
PAUL: Exactly. So that's interesting.
So you must have been,
well, not must have been,
but by the time you reached that age of 18
and you were travelling down to London
to see Hair,
was theatre becoming something where you
thought, oh, maybe I could
do this professionally?
Did you go to university?
SIMON: Yes, it is something I wanted to do,
but I was too stupid to get
into university via A level and so on.
PAUL: I don't believe that, Simon.
SIMON: But on the other hand,
I was clever enough to get into Oxford
because you didn't have to do A levels,
you just have to go for a chat.
It's a bit like this,
Paul. But I didn't like it there at all,
so I left it after a year, I was reading
Modern History,
and started with the Romans.
I didn't really like it because it was
a very, I don't know, old fashioned place
with people I didn't much care for.
So I stopped going there
and decided to go to drama school.
To do Stage Management, as we've discussed
but yes, I wanted to be a director.
PAUL: And obviously you'd seen Hair,
at that stage when you decided to not
continue at Oxford and pursue this notion
of becoming a director,
were there directors whose work you'd
seen or you admired at that stage or not?
PAUL: No, but now you mention it,
what I was doing, I was reading...
Penguin had this series of new
plays of the late 50s/60s really.
And that was quite a revolutionary time.
I mean, Waiting For Godo,
which was a Great revolutionary play,
was directed by, you may remember, no you
won't remember, but you may know by Peter
Hall in the West End at the Arts Theatre.
PAUL: Yes.
SIMONE: But there were all sorts of writers,
so I was reading all of the worlds.
They published anthologies,
so you had about 4 writers to a copy
and then it was a whole series.
So I was quite familiar with what was
going on and what the influences were from
France, for instance, and other places.
The place where things weren't
happening was America, weirdly.
Europe was, you know, abuzz with all sorts
of creativity and all sorts of politics.
PAUL: I suppose as well, when you said largely
for your childhood,
but certainly as you were growing up,
a period of big dramatic
change happening very fast.
SIMON: Exactly.
PAUL: I think everyone thinks, I suppose,
of the late 60s and Paris in 68 and all
of that kind of stuff that was going on.
Were you always drawn to new writing?
Because I think of you as someone who's
fascinated by new theatre and new voices
was this something that was
there at the beginning?
Was it never going to be
Shakespeare or the classics?
It was always new work?
SIMON: Well, it was, but not
quite as narrowly as that.
I was living in a time when the greatest
cultural influence was The Beatles,
and they started in, what, 62,
with Love Me Too, Please Please Me.
And if you go all the way through to,
I don't know,
Sergeant Pepper and then the White Album,
the amount of change creatively that they
were mirroring was extraordinary.
Technical change,
but also the way in which generations were
shifting, the way in which people looked
at things, and that was
happening sort of everywhere.
There were just an early indication
of that, and the world was changing.
And to be young at that time
had the possibility of being independent.
Nobody really bothered about getting on
the housing ladder or anything like that.
These were not concerns.
I mean, I lived on nothing.
I lived all my life like a student,
frankly,
because there were things to do,
there were ideas to get your head around,
so it was really part of that.
And the old plays were...
I mean, of course old plays,
there are some wonderful old plays,
but in my head, and in other people's
head, they were part of an older,
free war generation.
That generation was exhausted
and wanted a quiet life.
Quite rightly, as you can imagine,
and they wanted everything calm
and each thing in its place,
and we didn't want that.
PAUL: You're absolutely right.
The impact that The Beatles had through
that decade of the 60s,
charting that via their albums
and how they changed and everything.
And we'll come to more specific works
in a moment, but I'm interested to find
yourself at Bristol Old Theatre School.
And my previous guest last month was
another director of a different
generation, Justin Audibert, who's now,
as you know, taken over at Chichester,
and I was asking him about his training.
He did a course in directing at Birkbeck
and I'm just curious what
your training was like.
So was it very rooted in psychological
realism and Stanislavski?
What was the training like then?
SIMON: No, it was mostly Stage Management.
First of all, the Stage Management
training was very good.
PAUL: Yeah.
SIMON: And it was a great year,
and I learned all about all the things you
have to learn: lighting, sound,
flying, how to sweep a floor,
all that kind of stuff, and how actors
were going to treat you all your life.
But the Director's course actually was
made up mostly of telling Directors how
to deal with the technicalities
of theatre, which was useful if you'd just
come from Oxbridge,
it wasn't useful to me,
because I already done it, so I got to go
out and direct tours in the West Country.
PAUL: Ah, I see.
So these were small shows that were
travelling around in a van,
that sort of thing?
SIMON: No, funnily enough I did that.
That's how I got my Equity card,
which you had to have in those days,
travelling with Brian Way's Theatre Centre
in a van, as you say, four people -
PAUL: Of course, yeah.
SIMON: Two shows a day around the villages
of Cornwall and all the way going
up to Warwickshire, I think.
And that was fantastic a three months
education, and this was sort of like that,
but obviously with students,
and Drama School,
Bristol Old Vic students,
and we were doing it for like,
a week or something.
PAUL: So when you come out of Bristol,
you've done your directing and stage
management training, what was the next move?
SIMON: The next move coming out of Bristol,
I went to be an ASM
for very short period of time, I went
to what was then called the 69
Theatre Company which
became the Royal Exchange in Manchester.
PAUL: Became the Manchester Royal Exchange?
SIMON: Yes.
And it had the mock up
of the auditorium as it is now.
We built a full size mock up there and we
were doing shows in the cathedral.
I remember, for instance,
A Man for All Seasons.
I was there for two shows.
Man for All Seasons.
Bob Hoskins was the Common Man.
PAUL: Wow. Wow!
SIMON: Yes.
And then I went and did again a short
burst - Oh I think before that,
I think I had been a Follow Spot Operator
at Manchester Library,
and they had two theatres there,
the Library and the one out on the edge of
town, I can't remember what it's called -
PAUL: Contact?
SIMON: No, it wasn't.
No, it was in a rare auditorium.
Anyway, and I shone a follow spot on the
two leads of a musical, a booth musical.
One being my new wife, Teresa Stretfields,
and the other being Alan Rickman,
just out of RADA.
PAUL: Wow!
SIMON: I know, I know.
PAUL: Of couse I have to ask you, you know,
the two male actors you mentioned.
Now, I was never fortunate enough to see
Bob Hoskins on stage,
but I think on screen and TV,
he certainly, for me,
was an amazing performance in three
things that stick in my mind.
One, the BBC Pennies from Heaven.
by Dennis Potter, in which he was superb.
And then, of course, later
in The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa.
SIMON: Yeah, fantastic.
PAUL: When you see someone,
presumably he was relatively,
you know, not starting out,
but I wonder what point
of his career was he at?
SIMON: Well, he was getting the part
of the Common Man, at the Royal Exchange.
So he was something.
James Maxwell was playing the lead.
PAUL: Who directed it?
SIMON: Caspar Wrede, also one
of the artistic directors there.
Swedish
PAUL: Go back to your
memory about Bob Hoskins.
SIMON: Okay.
I first saw Bob Hoskins
when I was at drama school
in the Bristol Vic Studio, the new studio,
because he was part
of Ken Campbell's troop
PAUL: Wow.
Of course he was, yes.
SIMON: It was absolutely fantastic.
Driving a six inch nail up your nose,
all of those things.
And Bobby's strong arm stuff.
You wrap a big rope around your neck
and you have a member of the audience
at each end pulling it you know,
those things they used to do.
It was a brilliant show,
and that's where I first came across Bob.
PAUL: It's interesting when you mention
a theatre of change and a reaction to what
went before of which things like
Ken Campbell is very much part of that.
Not necessarily just a writer
sitting and writing a play.
SIMON: Yes.
PAUL: But the world of things like
The People Show and Ken Campbell,
presumably you were obviously being
exposed to that kind of work as well.
SIMON: Yes, and later on I was working
with those people at The Bush.
But it's worth remembering
The People Show,
as I try to remember every day,
because I'm sure you,
being a student of theatre history,
know that they were the first
fringe company in this country.
But it goes back a while, I think in 66
they played at Better Books, didn't they?
At Charing Cross Road?
And obviously, as you know,
they're still playing,
and one of their founders, Mark Long,
is still leading the company.
PAUL: I think their kind of relentless pursuit
of the wild, the crazy,
the anarchic, and often the profound.
SIMON: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
PAUL: Inspirational.
SIMON: Brilliant company.
PAUL: So how did you end up
getting the job at The Bush?
Because that's quite
a prestigious gig to get that.
SIMON: Well, it wasn't then.
PAUL: Oh, really?
At that point it wasn't?
SIMON: Oh no, no, no. Because when I went there,
fringe theatre barely existed.
There were a couple, I think,
of theatres, pub theatres.
There was us and the King's Head, and I think maybe the Orange Tree.
That was it.
So this kind of area of...
and we were kind of terribly scorned
by the theatrical establishment.
I remember an Equity councillor calling
us grubby thrusters,
which I thought was rather good.
PAUL: That's brilliant - I hope
you owned that side.
SIMON: So no, it wasn't at all because the Bush
wasn't, in that sense, the Bush.
It had been going two years, less than
two years, probably, when I got there.
PAUL: What year did you get there, Simon?
SIMON: 75.
Yeah, so there wasn't really much. Things
were just beginning in the theatre.
The landscape was very
different to what it is now.
I got it in a time-honoured manner
when I was at the 69 Theatre Company, now
the Royal Exchange, there was a woman
who was doing the marketing, I think,
there, and she ended up down in London
helping out the Bush, and they'd
never had a stage manager.
They wanted one because they were taking
a Stephen Poliakoff play
to the Edinburgh Festival and they wanted
somebody who would build the set and
figure out sound,
the lighting and all of that.
So she called me up and said,
would I do that?
And I had nothing else on, so I said yes.
And the reason that this wasn't the highly
sought after job is
that nobody got paid much.
I mean, when I got there it was 18 pounds
a week, I think, in the days when
18 pounds would buy you something.
So I went and as a stage manager,
I went out to Edinburgh.
Poliakoff was just leaving to become
the first writer in residence
at the National Theatre, very young,
and he wrote us a farewell play called
City Sugar, which actually went to the
West End in a not very good transfer.
And then I stayed and then the management
that was there, there was two
of them and they hated each other.
They hated each other so much, and
there wasn't a career in it anyway,
let's face it, at these
levels of money and so on.
I think we began to get an Arts Council
grant in the first year,
of £4000 or something and they made a pact
that they would leave if the other left,
which they then did.
And I said oh, well, I'll do that then.
And I did it.
PAUL: Wow.
SIMON: We had a guy who'd also left Oxford,
very good guy, who came in and knew about
sums and became the Business Manager
and he was very good.
And the Bush got incorporated
into a company with an accountant
and lawyers and all of that.
And we brought in Dusty Hughes was brought
in, who was at that time
Literary Critic at Time Out.
PAUL: And he came as your kind
of Literary Manager?
SIMON: No, no, he came as the Artistic Director.
So the three of us ran it.
All the time I was there, we
had three Artistic Directors.
PAUL: That's interesting, of course,
because with Told by an Idiot,
we started with three Artistic Directors.
SIMON: Yeah.
PAUL: And for 20 odd years we were like that.
And I really look back on that formative
period of time for us,
I think we benefited hugely
from three imaginations, I really do.
SIMON: Oh, I agree completely.
PAUL: That dynamic.
It works.
It's brilliant.
SIMON: Yes.
And three is a good number, because
you need a vote, so you
can get two against one.
I mean, one of the most successful
and revolutionary theatres of that time
was the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow,
doing this very high concept European
style theatre in the Gorbals,
of all places.
Absolutely amazing.
And they had three Artistic Directors.
One was a director, one was a designer,
one was a writer, and they were a great
role model, I thought,
for us, in those terms.
PAUL: Yeah, no, that's very interesting.
This might be too difficult to answer,
because obviously you supported, nurtured,
developed some extraordinary writers,
I'm sure, during that period of time.
I have two questions, really.
I'm not going to pin you down to one
particular production, that would be
impossible, but what were the writers
that you most enjoyed working
with during your time at the Bush?
SIMON: That is an impossible question,
because they were very different.
PAUL: Of course.
SIMON: And they represented different plays
in different ways, a huge variety.
That was the great secret, that
I was determined, we were all determined
to do the best play,
to have in the best company,
rather than the best play like this.
You know what mean?
The style was not dominating.
What was dominating was talent,
and that's always, for me, been the key.
The writer I think I most enjoy possibly
working was Snoo Wilson,
do you remember Snoo, who died terribly
prematurely just ten years ago.
He was an extraordinary talent,
very underrated now,
and a co founder of Portable Theatre,
of course, one of the very
early new writing companies.
And he was a polymath,
a great guy, beekeeper.
But there were many, many, and, of course,
we were taking on new
writers all the time.
Kevin Elliott was an actor, alas,
also now dead, but a very good actor.
And he was in one of my early plays,
and we gave him his first
commission as a writer.
And he became, obviously,
with My Night With Reg and all of that,
very well known as a writer, but
there were a lot of writers like that.
PAUL: But I suppose also, I mean,
we're going to move to actors
and the director's relationship
with the actor shortly, Simon.
Before we do that,
we're going to go to our item that we
have each month, which is Ask an Idiot.
CALLER: Hello, my name is Colm Gleeson and I'd
like to ask Simon what was the biggest
professional risk he's ever
taken and did it pay off?
PAUL: Great question.
Over to you, Simon.
SIMON: It is a great question because apart
from the idea of risk, you're working
in new plays, it's all a risk, isn't it?
Because that is part of the point.
And you've obviously got to guard
against piling risk on risk on risk.
The risk is taken with the
original choices, I think.
I mean, I've taken lots and lots
of different kinds of risks in my time.
I'm going to pick one
after I'd worked at the Bush, the Bush,
as I was saying earlier,
really started from very little.
They'd had some success, but very little.
I was there for twelve years and the Bush
became something of a national and even
international success
and it started in a very unpromising place
in Shepherd's Bush on the
corner of Goldhawk Road.
And Goldhawk Road was a pretty rough place
in those days and Shepherd's Bush Green
also was pretty rough, so it wasn't
a delightful middle class
enclave of any kind.
So we did all that and I left there
in the late 80s and worked
abroad in different countries.
And I had offers.
I had an offer to go and run a strand
at the National from Peter Hall.
He wanted me to do that.
BBC wanted me to become a Drama Producer
and bring my contacts there and I didn't
really want to do those things,
partially because I was knackered,
I mean, I ran the Bush.
But I went into a venture,
apart from Freelancing,
I was in a venture with Howard Panter,
who eventually founded ATG,
where I worked with him,
to bring new plays into the West End,
into commercial theatre.
Which possibly wasn't the best idea
in the world, because you spend all
the time, not so much finding the new
plays, but finding the star who is going
to hold a new play up,
which is not a very edifying way to go
about things,
but nevertheless is necessary.
And there was a recession
also going on in the 90s.
It was Howard who said to me at some point
they need someone like you
in a place called Plymouth.
And I said, okay.
And I went down to meet Adrian Vinken.
I can't remember what the job title was,
Creative Producer or something like that.
And eventually, once I'd got the job,
I said, nobody understands what that is
I'm going to be called Artistic Director,
if you don't mind.
They had money because they had a big
commercial concern going
on the large stage.
So I went there.
I chose to go there because I wanted....
It was a sort of sociological experiment.
I wanted to see if you could do plays such
as you and I do new plays and make them
work anywhere or did it have to be
in the flesh pots of London or
in Birmingham or Manchester.
Plymouth had absolutely no history of this
kind of creative speciality,
but it had a very good theatre,
the Drum Theatre, Studio Theatre,
which you know well.
And I thought, well it should be possible.
And if it is not possible,
we're all damned, aren't we, in the end?
Because we're going to have
to go where the living is easy.
So I went there and I applied the various
rules and methods that I have
for programming and the meats
of programming, which is fundamentally
to do your own plays,
to have visiting companies who will sign
up for a period of time for at least
a week, because companies were coming,
but it was all one day or two days.
Nobody could ever make any sense
of what was on or what was coming next.
And the implication was, and if you come,
you have to come next year,
because you've got to build an audience.
It's not me building an audience for you,
you got to build the audience as well.
And then we started
going into coproduction.
It's about talent spotting, but it's
also about commitment to the talent.
It's about being as
generous as you can be.
Not just, we weren't generous
with the money at all,
as you may wish me remember,
but we were generous,
certainly with time and alcohol and the
chat and all of that kind of stuff.
And we were fairly generous in not looking
to see what this play was,
but what the run of plays was going to be,
what's the play, the one after next going
to be like, so that we would have
the benefit also of that development.
Mind you, that's a question
of spotting the talent first.
PAUL: I can only obviously speak for myself
and Told by an Idiot,
but I am very, very glad you took
that risk, Simon, because I think
the way in which you certainly supported
us, and not just us,
I've had this conversation with Scott
and Steven at Frantic, in fact.
I remember we were desperate,
searching for new partners and Scott
and Steven said, you should talk to Simon
at Plymouth because
he's really, really supportive
of all types of new work.
And I think that is a big risk.
But I think you gave a platform there.
As you say,
it's not just about a financial
commitment, it's about being able
to ring you and chat and talk.
Yeah, I'm very, very
glad that you did that.
I've got one final question before I do
my quick fire questions,
because it's been so lovely I could talk
to you all day, but we'll
do that in our own time.
Obviously, you've mentioned actors,
actors who have gone on to be incredibly
successful,
like Bob Hoskins and Alan Rickman,
I'm just curious particularly, I suppose,
during your Harold Panter days,
that what was it like when you're
directing not only big actors,
but actors who maybe have
very contrasting backgrounds?
I'm obviously thinking of John Malkovich
and Juliet Stevenson
here that you directed.
And I'm curious because, for me,
they seem the polar opposite.
SIMON: Well, I didn't direct Juliet Stevenson.
PAUL: Ah, but you did John Malkovich?
SIMON: I did direct John, yes.
Very different backgrounds,
very different outlooks.
And the thing I think I would say mostly,
and this is not just about actors,
but people should never underestimate
cultural difference
because everybody thinks they know what
it's like, but in different
countries it ain't like that.
The approach is different and the obvious
difference is that in America, Britain has
grown up via the written word very often.
I know people like you are the engines
of change,
and that has happened over quite a long
while now, but we're famous since
Shakespeare's time from the written world.
America is fundamentally
a spoken world country.
They have great writers, of course,
but I think from the early days,
the speaking and the listening are more
akin to somewhere like South Africa,
the Zulus, for instance,
who never wrote anything down,
but it was all passed down.
So there are differences.
I think the thing that you have
to understand about celebrities tostart,
in fairness, is that they are carrying
the weight on their shoulders.
They have got it all to lose
and not much to gain.
Everybody else is not
in that circumstance.
Nearly everybody else has got something
to gain and not much to lose.
So when you look at it like that,
you have a great deal more respect
for how they need it to work
for themselves or the company.
And a good leading actor will lead the
company, which John did magnificently.
And they have foibles because they have
their own experience,
they have a lot on their plate,
all the marketing is on them.
They have a reputational
damage to stare in the face.
And that's, I think,
what you have to be very well aware of,
which I wasn't actually at the time,
but I was made aware of it.
PAUL: That's fascinating.
Simon, I'm going to finish, like I always
do with eight rapid fire questions.
You just say the first response
that comes into your head.
Peter Brook or Peter Hall?
SIMON: Peter Brook.
PAUL: Harold Pinter or Sam Shepard?
SIMON: Sam Shepard.
PAUL: Sauvignon Blanc or Chardonnay?
SIMON: Sauvignon Blanc.
PAUL: Biarritz or Cadaqués?
SIMON: I don't know where the second
place is, so I'll go Biarritz.
PAUL: Cadaqués is where Salvador Dali was born.
You should go
after you've been to Biarritz.
Tracy Emin or Paula Rego.
SIMON: Tracy Emin.
PAUL: A Clockwork Orange or
Lindsay Anderson's If...?
SIMON: A Clockwork Orange.
PAUL: Jam roly-poly or apple pie?
SIMON: Oh, that's a tricky one, isn't it?
I think I'll go apple pie.
PAUL: Pros arch or theatre in the round?
SIMON: Depends on the play.
PAUL: Of course it does.
It's a ridiculous question.
I came up with a very tough one
with the jam roly-poly or apple pie,
and then I finished
with a ludicrous question.
Apologies.
Simon, it's been really
lovely chatting to you.
Thank you so much for your time.
And also, it's brilliant to get an insight
into different periods of time as well,
just socially and creatively
it's been really fascinating.
And we'll meet for one of our regular
glasses of Sauvignon Blanc very soon.
SIMON: That will be a great pleasure.
And this has been a great pleasure.
Thank you very much.
PAUL: Thanks, Simon. All the best.
SIMON: Take care.
PAUL: Listeners, if you've enjoyed this
Idiot podcast, please spread the word.