captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: michael boyd is back. he has been the artistic direct orr of the royal shakespeare company since 2003. when he took over he promised to knock shakespeare off his pedestal. his sense of what he calls the duty to experiment has turned the company around and won him critical acclaim. he will step down from his post in 2012. i'm very pleased to have him back to talk about the complexity, the allenges and the genius of william shakespeare, all part of our series "why shakespeare?" welcome back. >> lovely be here. >> rose: since you were here you've announced you ear leaving. >> yup. it will be ten yearsext year and, of course, i thought about whether to go for a third term as it were and i felt like i would spend time in a rehearsal roomith no queue behind the door. and it's time to hand it over to someone else. there's a great bunch of brit irk directors comin through. >> rose: well, there's a list of people, kenneth branagh and michael grandage. there a good people willing to step in. >> there are good people, colleagues of mine, there's a terrific field and somereally good women dirtors as well. >> rose: when you look back there's a chance for you to sort of say this is what i intend to do and this is what i did. >> i wanted to reserve collaborative art form, the ensemble. >> that was principle, the idea that we will have a group of actors. >> it was partly idealism, partly wanting to experiment with artistic community that the work happens in the space between us. in a wonderful collaborativ way. and in some ways it was purely pragmatic. stratford is in the middle of england, very badly served by puic tnsport. you can only make tater retreat there so it's the perfect place to trap artists and chemothem there for three years taking their art form seriously. >> rose: and what else? >> internationalism. being much more outward looking. we moved from a theater in london and i didn't wa us to be a fortress. and both in the complete world of the shakespeare festival a few years ago and next year in the largest perfoing arts festival any time... >> rose: at the time of the olympics. >> the royal shakespeare festival. we are inviting artists from brazil,exico, russia, the united states. they're co-producing with us. to enlarge our vocabulary and welcome to them whatever we can give them. that outward looking curiosity, that determination to see shakespeare as our contemporary, to look at him afresh every time with the naivete of a child and revisit him not just retread the old rails. >> rose: did you knock him off his pedestal? >> well, we've produced some remarkable conteorary pieces of work. when i mean "knock m off his pedestal" it's partly the campaign to produce the next share peer and in dennis kly, the author of "our mattel di d.a." which opened recently and is coming to new york next year i think we've produced a major piece of lyrical work in the work of david greg we have as well over the years three marvelous plays. in the other sense of knocking him off his pedestal, stopping seeing him... stop celebrating him as from... some nostalgic view of what englishness used to be and yearning back to it but actually to open him up and see what's ling in there. what's dangerous in there. >> rose: he can be a contemporary figure? >> he's appallingly contemporary. >> appallingly contemporary? >> just in the green room i was listening to your previous guests talking about what's happening in syria and afghanistan and the see ya/sunni split is dramatized and still alive in shakespeare's work live in an england ill shaking with the reformation between the new protestant rulers have more or le illegalized catlicism which was the religion for ages in britain and that conflict runs through shakespeare's work like a print in rock. >> rose: you also said once that to say... for people to say if it's not in the next it's not teibly creative. >> i think the text has always goto be the starting point. partly because one of the... >> rose: all t text? >> one of them... one of the most important bits of magic about shakespeare is that he was he was writing... before print real took over he himself spelt h name probably about 15 different ways, let alone all the other words in his work. we've got very little manuscript of his. but his spelling is appalling. what was regular, what he knew about was the sound of words, the embodied quality of the words. so his text is not meant to be read. you can't say some of his lines without smiling. you can't say some of his lines without bringing a violence into the air. it's... it's vy, very concrete but i think if you satisfy yourself with a purely scholarly view, if you treat shakespeare purely as archaeology then he will feel dry and dusty. just as i think in the classroom we shouldn't teach children sitting down reading the text, we should put the desks to one side, get themup o their feet and start very early as well, start them in elementary school. don't leave it till later. don't patronize them. >> rose: but there's also this thing called maximal text, isn't ther >> i'm not sure what i know what that means. >> rose: the idea that shakesare was meant to be whittled down. >> ah. well, we... the best record we've got of his plays are the ones that are probably closest to his fullest intentions, the folio. but we also have different versions of... probably derivative of prompt copys that are probably maybe closer to what he was actually allowed to perform and maybe for the best. he talks about "romeo and juliet"... >> rose: because of time or... >> because of time. the prologu in "romeo and juliet" says "the two hours traffic of our stage." and there are a lot of rome owe and jewel yets that last longer than two hours. and maybe that's because each time there was a whittled down text. maybe it was the performers and the audience were in a very close kind of union that allowed very fast speaking and that the performer... what they wanted in the theaters was ahead of the listener, not the listener going "yeah, got it, hurry up." we do i think we do indulge particularly with psychological readings of shakespeare in a very slow, dubious deliverynd i suspect even the long text would ve taken a shorter period of time in shakespeare. >> rose: when you have a director that you have hired because you know they have skills, how do y tell them to approach it? do you say to them "don't be too reverent about shakespeare"? "be prepared to be creative about . be... make shakespeare alive." >> i'm not usual starting... i'm lucky atthe r.s.c., lots of people want to work there. so i'm not usually starting from first principles. i will now know... they've done it a lot of times before, probably. and i will know the kind of approach that might be taking and thereforely let them get on with it and then it comes to a preview in the theater or during the dress rehearsals wherely go and just be a fresh pair of eyes for them. but i... i hope over the last ten years... i've run quite a broad church from deconstructionists to very recognizable quite traditional but beautiful interpretations. and i probably sit somewhere in the middle. >> rose: you're in the middle? >> yeah. >> rose: who are the inheritors of shakespeare? >> i think ctemporary filmmakers contemporary rappers. one like j z, eminem, they inherit one part of it. that extraordinarily quick fire highly organized highly wittymetry cal rhyming language. brilliant. in terms of consciously addressing the whole so of society it's the movie makers and the television... >> rose: people doing great drama on television. >> yeah. but they have... there's something miing there that maybe jay-z doesn't at a live concert. he's in direct contact with his audience. >> rose: whatbout ply rights? >> whereas filmmakers... and playwrights are the direct descendants, obviously. and they are aware of the dynamic between stage and auditorium. they're aware that a play only happens in that space between the stage and the auditorium and that they are addssing our live community and that's something architecturally we've tried to reflect in our new royal shakespeare theater that it's consciously a community gathered around the stage. and the other sitting in a dark space over there. and playwrights for the theater are able to respond to that. you don't get answered back at all in the movies. that's an element that's missing. >> rose: kind of pedantic, isn't it? >> well, it's not necessary they's pedantic. but the means of production are miles away from the audience. thousands of miles for most people away from the audience. so that kind of dialogue between the people that are bei talked to and the talkers is a more sterile one. >> rose: but here's what's interesting. we said it at the beginning. shakespeare demands to be relevant. by the breadth and depth and focus of things that will be part of a society forever. the politics, the revenge, conflict. establishment versus... >> rose: >> the reason shakespeare is still alive is he couldn't help being relevant. he wasn't trying to be clever. he needed himself to explain the world around him to himself. >> rose: he needed to explain it to himself. >> the's a wonderful piece of advice a celebrated actor gave to would be actors. i can't remember who it was but he said "don't do it unless you can't do anything else." and i don't think shakespeare could do anything else. he was an okay actor but really the thing he could do was write and there was an urgency. there was a real need. the audience needed it, too, for it... needed it to be relevant as well. there was that visceral communication between a writer and the audience at that tim too many of shakespeare's contemporaries fell into the trouble of being poe lem cysts, essayists, agitators. teachers, in a way, shakespeare in order to stay alive and out of jail kept the drama and the explanation of what it's like to be alive in the face of mortality and the abuse of powe he kept it all within a play. within his "to be or not to be" and therefore risk your life or should you let it be? how should we best behave? how can you deal another tremendous relevance of his work forus today is the appalling polarization between amorality, rampant immorality, and a rigid fundamentalist ideological puritanism. th we're being driven into a choice between tse two and shakespee tries to pop you late the human land in between. >> ros how didyour russian experience shape you in terms of a dramati and as a royal shakespeare company director? >> i think maybe the most important thing was witnessing how urgent theater was as a art form inhe 1970s in soviet moscow. that the... not only were people sort of peering around the and the theaters were fantastically full but you couldn't, for instance, produce ibsen's "enemy of the people" under that title because it would be read as an attack on the government, ennobling an enemy of the government. there's a word in russian that's used to denounce people who were dissidents, really. so... and particularly actually in terms of shakespeare being... russian work on shakespeare i hanot realize before how urgent he was, how urgent hamlet was seen dealing with this corrupt state dominat by claudius. that figure becomes so important for an eastern european audience member at that time. empathizing with this man, trying to take apart an unfair, dangerous world and behave with integrity and effectively within it. and how do you do that? and nobody dramatizes that better than shakespeare. >> rose: but that's clearly what we saw in the arab spring, which we continue to see in the arab spring. which leads back to the remarks you said about the segment we did about syria. >> we're working with a wonderful group of tunisian artists who are doing something very much set in the last days in the last regime of tunisia. we're working next year with the iraqi theater company from baghdad on rome owe and yule yet and... "romeo and liet" and sunni/shi'a as montague and capulet. we're doing "much ado about nothing" with all the pressures around marriage and honor and which is aty set in the the punjab with british asian actors who have long regarded shakespeare as their artist much morehan their white caucasian fellow bri. they've long regarded him as absolutely a soap opera writer of their lives and we're celebrating that next year, which is great. >> rose: he's been called the greatest language enhancer of all time. >> well, he invented a great deal of words. >> rose: invented words. those words he used tha nobody'd ever heard before. >> yeah. he joine words together, used them a new way, enriching the vocabulary, finding... finding new ways of talking. good poetry, goodoetics comes out over a need. how can you say this so that it's absolutely on the button. it doesn't get you in trouble and it is memorable. not just for the audience but also for the actors as well because they didn't get a whole script. they just got their queue lines and very little time to rehearse. i made a very big fuss at the r.s.c. of lengthening rehearsal time-- partly from any experience in russia-- witnessing what was possible with more prepation time. but in shakespeares time i have to admit they whamed it on the stage very, very quily. so the pneumonic power of shakespeare's language is a very pragmatic thing. >> rose: but you're saying by lengthening the rehearsal time your actors became more in command of the language? >> they become for command of the language. theyre after a dealing unlike shakespeare's own actors they're dealing with a language from... most like a foreign language. they have more time to find each other out and actually more time to eventually start directing the play themselves and make the director redundant. some of my happiest times in rehearsal are working on maybe the fourth play with the same company. the fourth play in a row and beginning to realize that they have found it. they've got the language. they're almost... the production is writing itself. >> rose: one more reason to have an ensemble company. because of that depth of understanding. because of the courage that's possible. when you're not worried about embarrassing yourself, you've already done everything embarrassing you possibly could in front of all these people, when you know... you know what kind of shape of thing to throw at that person, it's not the same thing as what you want to throw at the other person. >> rose: what does a great direor do when he's introducing shakespeare? >> i mean... there >> there's an extent to whichly probably be very inarticulate about this. it starts, i think, with a hunch. some hunch about... about a play, a hunch... say macbeth which i've directed recently. there was a hunch that the play shouldn't be that unlucky. and that led me to really get interested, to be really precise about hit in the england scene and in a little bit about king edward the confessor that's cut from every single production yore ever likely to see except mine. and this is the sacred saintly king of memory, the one sainted english king ever. and i follow my hunch that there was a cale in the darkness in that scene and i started reading up about it. i discovered that the miracle that qualified him for sanctity in rome-- you have to apply for sainthood-- and the miracle that qualified hiwas having a dream about a tree that was dismembered and then reassembled and it had miraculous powers. he woke up from that dream according to the application to vatican and ordered... i think it was an oak tree to be dismembered, moved 30 yards and then regrafted and that tree s according miraculous powers. and that made sense to me. it was a miracle, it was a natural miracle that was borne out of malcolm's time spent with king edward the confessor in england and that actually play is quite redemptive. there is a redeplgts at the end of macbeth of sorts. >> rose: you had never seen that before? >> no, theatrical tradition, i think, has wallowed in the darkness in macbeth quite irresponsibly. footering with evil like with a ouiji board and it didn't feel shakespearean to me. he always goes to the darkest places, never leaves as moral responsibility at the door, always goes to those dark places trying to be fully human, trying to be good. >> rose: let me understand this. going to the darkest places trying to be good. meaning? >> in the face of despair towards the end of "king lear," everything goes appallingly wrong wrong. at the en edgar says, you know, we haven't reached the worst while still we live to say this is the worst. it gets worse and wse. he liess his father. shakespeare changed the end of that play from his source material to kill cordelia off at the end whereas actually she lives in his source material. so if he just... is he just dragging us into despair? no, he's not. he's not trying to gloss over our mortality or the brutality of regimes and the unkindness of man to man, the inhumanity of man to man, but he in the case of lea comes up with humility and love parks term love, romantic love is his answer. or he comes up with the injunction to us to i think perhaps his most important one is to see feelingly when gloucester loses his eyes. we hear from him that he sees feelingly. >> rose: sees feelingly. >> sees feelingly. and what that's about in shakespeare i think is not being a smarty pants theorist or rationalist looking clear sightedly for the solution. but to feel your way through. and in the end the solution is always love and hue tily. but he's not... shakespeare's not interested ultimately there are what we think, he's interested in what we feel. and in a feeling, then is contained the contradictions in a are inherent in shakespeare, they keep the drama alive, they ep his plays alive. >> rose: what kind of contradiction? >> the contradiction that runs through every aspect of shakespeare. the country boy, the city boy. the one who uses the high courtly language of the romance languages of latin and the one who uses crude anglo-son. the protestant boy whose father was probably a catholic. the man who probably had a sexual ambiguity about him as well. constantfully two places. the man who had twins and lost one of them. there is a duality about shakespeare's work which in the end is the d.n.a. encapsulated most famously in "to be or not to be." that makes him like an unstabl at tom still generate ergy for us now whenever we go and really look at what he's saying bhand what he's doing. >> rose: do you find audiences in different places? different countries react differently? or tremendously? >> of course. >> rose: based on their own experience and what they bring to the theater? >> yes, whe i did troy liz and cressida in te aviv it was very different from doing in the a nice suburb of london. >> rose: yes, indeed. >> very different. conflict wa.. it was... it was just straight... it was water on a parched piece of grass whereas perhaps people who are not living in a dreadful civil war like in a war like in troilus and cressida are trying to work their way towards an understanding and another audience comes to it and they just go, yes, yes. of course. and audiens behave and feel their way into a piece differently as well. i mean, there are cliches about british reserve and american open heartedness, all the rest of it. russian audiences are perhaps the audiences that i've seen best for reading the puzzles in shakespeare because shakespea did wrap himself up in puzzles. the russians with all their "well, we don't believe what they say so what are they really saying?" their habit of decoding anything said in public immediately are like ducks to water to the puzzles in shakespeare. >> rose: we're going to see some scenes from hamlet. what was your operative by a sense of how y saw it? >> a hunch there was... >> rose: because you said it startsith a hunch. >> my hunch with "hamlet" when i staged it was that it was unfair to hamlet to call him a ditherer. or to say that it must be the result of some problem with his moth. the day killing claude jens. my hunch w that it was actually quite diicult to kill a king. that it might as well have bee a devil fromhell to tell him that his father had been murdered. it could be. he didn't know if claudius had done it. there was no eviden until claudius stood up, freaking out at the play withinhe play. and then he proceeds straightforwardly to kill him. he goes looking for him. he's distracted by his mother wanting to see him but during... the moment he hears claudius' voice he stabs him. unfortunately it's not claudius, it's plon i can't say. he goes to kill him and he won't kill him while he's at prayer for fear that grace will shorten his time in purgatory or stop him going to tell but perhaps unfairly taken to heaven. and then the full might of the state comes crashing down on him exiles him to england, he comes straight back to england in double quick time and as soon as the moment is right he kills claudius. so i suppose i was... my hunch was a political thriller. not just a totally internized play happening with inside hamlet's sll. rose: iike that. these are three scenes from the famous scenes in... between hamlet and the ghost. we'll look at three different directors and how they chose to direct and portray this scene. here it is. >> i am thy father's spirit doom'ed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burned and purged away. list, list, oh list. if thou didst ever thy dear father love... >> oh, god! >> revenge him murder! >> murder most foul as in the best iis. but this most foul strange and unnatural >> haste me to know it that i wi wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love may sweep to my revenge. >> i find thee apt. 'tis given out that sleeping in my orchard a serpent stung me but know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father's lifeow wears his crown! >> oh, my prophetic soul! my uncle! ay, that incestuous, that adult rat beast. >> they were in cron logical order in terms of production. >> yeah. >> rose: tell me what you saw when you watched that. >> interesting... there's a sort of tradition, actually, that all three are fond of quite a statueesque figure from beyond the grave. a stillness and a sadness in all of those stabbed through with an ugly violence in ken branagh's... with the blood coming out of the ear. the shock for the audience and the sense of unease at the te of seeing purgatory which official officially did not exist anymore in engla, it had been declared illegal, just think about it. that being placed on the london stage was an extraordinary thing. th thing... there are more things in heaven an earth than are dreamt of in our protestant philosophy in whitenberg, horatio. >> rose: yes. >> actually, i might be true all those superstions, they mit be true. that must have been so shocking. but it's lovely seeing a bit of david tenant's "hamlet" again. >> rose: you liked it? >> very much. i've never seen a sharper minded hamlet. you could almost feel his mind cutting the air as he dissected people and as he tried to cut his way towards the truth and then to action. >> rose: i went out to find as many as i could on video and david tenth unanimous's one was of the ones you could bye. it's remarkable, if you go searching you can fi a treasure tro of material. >> and the russian hamlet is tremendous. again a context where it was a very politically important event. >> rose: "king lear." how do you see that? what's your snufrj >> i don't know yet, which is probably why i haven't directed it. >> rose: but then how do you find it? >> you just have to wait. >> rose: you have to wait? you absorb as much as you can and then... >> you wait until you think there's... you can just feel a ttle glimmering ght inhe body somewhere. >> rose: you feel an instinct and then... >> and then you go... it's interesting because paradoxically "king lear" is my the language, shakespeare's language by lear and in "lear" so so striped to the bone and so powerful. so concrete and dangerous and true and he never loses sight of the soft humanity, the delightful relationship of the fool of leer. we're all in love with cordelia for all her brashness at the beginning with lear. i think maybe crudely and clumsily i've spent a lot of time thinking over lear and so now... >> rose: it's crude, do you think? >> yeah, i think it's probably wrong. i don't think it's true at all. i think young people can imagine age just as... an englishman could imagine italy. i... maybe "lear" will be a production that i do-- when i do it without a hunch. >> rose: when will you do it? >> i don know:. >> re: but is it next up for you? >> no, next up for me is apush kin. i'm doing a new dramatization of that. it's the last thing the great english poet adrian mitchell wrote before he died. and we haven't done itet. and that's pushkin trying to look at russian history very consciously borrowing from shakespeare's histories. i'm looking at russian history round about the same time of shakesare. >> rose: this is the final scene where lear is holding cordelia's dead body. (wailing) howl, howl, howl, oh, you are men of stones, had i your tongues and eyes i'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack. she's gone forever. i know when one is dead and wh one lives. she's dead as earth. lend me a looking glass if that her breath still mist or stain the stone why, then she lives. >> it is the promised end. >> or image of that horror? >> fall and cease. >> this feather stirs, she lives! if it be so, if t'sre a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever i have felt. >> rose: he's my favorite. >> he's my favorite. >> rose: favorite shakespearean actor or favorite "lear?" >> favorite "lear." that was our production. really enjoyed the arrogance and the vanity in the beginning. really understood it, got around it, played with it, celebrated it. and very courageous in alling hielf to betripped away by the end but never leaving his tools aside. always... always taking h craft wi him. even when he was splayed as an artist for the audience. not forgetting the skills. >> rose: there's some people... i think harold bloom may have said this. he didn't think "lear" could be realized on stage. >> i'm not sure... some scholars prefer reading the plays. absolutely. i have no problem. i obviously think they're misguided. i think... i've seen a lot of really quite wonderf productions. it is a ply that isually enjoy in the theate it's long, it's tricky. it's not a cheery piece. but i... i think it is. each embodiment is going to be partial. the very motion that you can have a complete capture of the play i thinks... i don't think is very useful. >> rose: and do you... some have said also that the play can teach us about knowledge and the price we pay for self-knowledge. >> shakespeare never underestimates... he's never glib about the cost. >> rose: the price you pay. >> yeah. he's a tremendous recorder of human pain. and sometimes in "measure for measure" he's almost a sadist the way he makes the duke play with isabella on the death of her brother delaying her... forcing her to really believe her brother has been executed when he hasn't and delay, delay, delay, delay. now in that case it's interesting. it's not very... the duke's behavior isn't that shakespearean. i don't think shakespeare would be quite that cruel but he loves having someone that cruel to test someone in the fire. and the people who come through their fires we adore like edgar who we find quite boaring in the beginning. but by the end we love him. we'vgone on a massive journey with him and he has learned something from the fire. >> rose: we love him because he's learned? >> yes. and without losing his humanity edmund haseen mistreated before the start of "king lear." he has been iored because he was bastard and is indeed treated with callusness by his father in the opening scenes. but edwin's reaction to the scorch of pain is to be corrupted. others... and to be in denial about his pain. war go is in pain about imagined infidelities... iago is in pain about imagined infidelities about his wife and that he hasn't been as successful as others in the army. but edmund and iago's reactions from to pretend they're not in pain, pretend they can be in control of their pain and to manage everyone around them. and that's shown to be a disastrous way forward. interestingly between them, edmund does find a glimmer of light at the end and tries to behave like a good man. iago is left charging off into the darkness refusing to say ood word. he's a character that's just not finished. like in 12th night, "i'll be revenged." we never see that revenge. there's a broken arm at the end of that play of malvolio's rage and there an unhealed wound in iago's silence. it's associated with why shakespeare went out of fashion for 200 years. it's seen as badly made, messy, incomplete, indecorous, vulgar, crude. i heard a brilliant young german director recently in london talk about how it's a really badly put together play. yeah, maybe. maybe. it's not neat. it's not resolved. it's not regular. >> rose: those were the things he said or were there other reasons? >> think he found it inconsistent. he found it messy. and the messes and contradictions doesn't stack up. the fact that it doesn't stac up is what makes it like life. >> rose: exactly film adaptations. >> i think my two favorite... i'm trying to think. my two favorite shakespeares on screen are probably... i've got there. a hamlet and "lear" with paul scofield. >> rose: peter brook? >> yes, peter brook's "lear" and "romeo and juliet." those are probably my three... that i found really exciting. the high romantic real danger and the sense of a palpably dangerous world and the broke lear, paul scofield, i think i first... i first really got shakespeare on a long plane with in record with paul scofield's voice. and that language not being... not being to be written down at all is meant to come out of the heart d because lure m... baz lure man somehow making that play leap off the screen really getting the religious side of it really getng young infatuation and passion and love, really getting the danger that... the gangster danger of it. and again, actually, baz not trying to tidy it up. it was a loose cannon of a film. >> "macbeth. do you like macbeth?" >> well, in terms of films, ntastic, absolutely devastatingly brilliant. >> rose: is it true that actors have trouble with "macbeth" or a certain act as a certain performance at a certain time in his life? >> i think it's a tricky relationship. it's a very... it's a very screwed up relationship. >> rose: in the one that you directed she minates, does she not? >> she dominated to start... i think in the play lady macbeth dominates to some extent to start wh and there is this wonderful paradoxical turning point. macbeth says "and macbeth sha sleeno more because i've done this." and she says "don't be silly, just wash your hands." and it's her that sleeps no more. in the end. whereas he goes on being very effective and killing the macduffs and so on. >> rose: the aforementioned harold bloom says it's the happiest marriage in shakespeare >> yes, it is. it is in some way i think benedict and beatrice will be happier and live a better life. i think orlandond rosalind. i would rather be one of them. though i'm not sure it's the best. but they have a very close understanding relationship. it's not... i dot think you can say it's happy there is the question of the child that lady macbh has given suck to and that doesn't seem to be around now. that strong hint of a loss, of a hole ithe middle of them, that was something that preoccupied us a lot when we were exploring. >> give me the dagger. give me dagger, the sleeping of the dead ar r but as pictures 'tis the eye of childhood. >> whence is that knocking, how is it with me whenever noise appalls me? what hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes. will all great neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? no no, this my hand will rather the multitudes now sea incarn di making the green one red. >> my hands of of your color but i shame to wear a heart so white i hear a knocking at the south entry. retire we to our chamber, a little water clears us of this deed. how easily it is then. your constantly hath left you unattended. hark! more knocking. put on your nightgown lest occasion call us and show us to be watchers. be not lost so poorly in yo thoughts. >> in your new life how are you going to find what it is you most wanto do. >> with patience, i think i need to put a gap between... >> rose: shakespeare? >> not necessarily shakespeare but perhaps between running a major iconic arts organization and the next thing that i do. >> the me de man on your time to do that, between management, pure management and art... >> yeah, it's a hard thing to do to keep moving forward as an artist while addressing the queue of people needing answers. >> exactly. >> it... yeah, it is demanding. it is demanding. and i'm looking forward to being the irresponsible one for a while. >> rose: (laughs) it's not my job. >> exactly. i have loved running the r.s.c. i have loved being the father of a communy. it's been an enormous privilege and, of course, you are given... for everything you give you get back ten times. >> rose: because what it tells you on life and what it tells you about... >> just the generosity of people's hearts and what they give as artists and as people ck to you who are maybe constantly feeling sorry for yourselfbout the queueoutside the door. >> rose: their need to create. >> yes. and their... the energy they generate as a result of being given the opportunity to create and just to witness, to be happy to be lucky enough to have witnessed the coming tether of people. the whole has been greater than the sum of its parts. that we don't have to to atomize into individualism. that it has been meaningful bringing people together. and that they have learned from each other. it is possible to learn and make art at the same time. >> rose: do you want to make movies? >> it's never been something that i've had the time to pursue so far. it could be something that could come like a hunch in the. in the gap that i hope will exist. >> rose: i think you should write a memoir and the title ought be "hunch." >> the hunch. >> rose: the hunch. and have you thought about a memoir? >> i have only thought a memoir in moments of vengeful anr. into. >> rose: really? do get even the w... >> and tt's it the worst... >> rose: exactly. who would you like to get everyone with? >> oh, i wouldn't dream of talking about that. >> rose: (laughs) but there demons or... >> no, but in the ten years and e push and shove of running an organization... >> and some people that made your life more difficult than it was necessary to be. >> rose: there are moments in conflict. >> did shakespeare help in those moments? >> he preach forgiveness. that's the absolute only answer and revenge as being the road to hell. >> rose: venn vens and revenge is the road to hell? >> absolutely. so i probably wrote write those memoirs. >> rose: (laughs) so we should expect toee you headed out of new york... >> well, we are coming back as a company shortly with our musical "matilda" which i think will probably have to wait until the spring of 2013. we're coming back to the armory with a production "king lear" for young people and i'msurely personally be over for that. and i pe that there will be projects. one mad project i'm working on is a western, a stage western. >> rose: with horses? with horses and... >> no, i don't think there will be live horses which is a shame. and i wouldn't rule them out. victorian theater with its... >> rose: so what is the appeal of the western? >> the sense of people exposed to the elements, to themselves, to each other. the conflict between different cultures. it's all there. actually, you know, the settlers and particularly morngs the gold rush community shakespeare was a massively popular figure. there was a great deal of currency around shakespeare out west in the mid-19th century. >> rose: thank you for coming. >> thank you for having me! captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group awgbh access.wgbh.org