forever. it happens in theater as well. if you get a whole audience focusing on one topic or one story in the case of shakespeare and they're all in the same room. feels our individual minds are capable of something more when we're together focused on something. >> there is an intersection of poetry and emotion that shakespeare is the very best example of that. you can look at it purely in terms of the beauty of the language, or you can look at it in terms of the power and shakespeare's extraordinary empathy. >> rose: a celebration of william shakespeare when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: kenneth brannen is here. he is currently starring in and co-directing macbeth at the park avenue armory in new york city. the production comes here from manchester, england, has received extraordinary reviews. michael billington of the guardian said at times he evoked golden memories of olivier in the role. here's a look at the trailer. (shouting) (thunder) >> what? can the devil speak truth? >> looks innocent. (thunder) >> is this a dagger which i see before me? (singing) >> lock that. order! >> rose: i'm pleased to have sir kenneth brannen back at this table. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: have you been waiting to do this? >> i have, circling it. it's the copy of the play i first came across was on our kitchen table when i was about ten or eleven years old. my brother was five years older than me. he was doing it at school. i saw three weird sisters on the cover. asked him what it was about. it was my first introduction to macbeth. the same copy i have at the park avenue armory with me every night. it's been waiting 40 years for that, i think. >> rose: do you need to do it at a time in your life? >> i think i have a great old acting school mentor from the royal academy of dramatic art, and we often talked about this part, you really have to wait till you tier right age. in my late 30s and early 40s, he said you're still too young. i didn't understand it, but when i listened to him, i revered him. somehow it came together through the manchester festival and meeting the co-director and finding the right elements to relate to macbeth. things started to fall together and it became the right time to do it. >> rose: but you'd had a ten-year absence from shakespeare. >> yes, i had. like many things in my career, others they look at it and view it differently. these sort of accidents happen. you find yourself on wonderful diversionary tracks. my wife says to me, oh, does he read shakespeare? is it by the bedside? does he read it? i said, what do you tell them? i told them, yes, you do. you're always doing that. so ten years away from doing it and quite a loft years of just reading it. >> rose: how is this macbeth different? >> well, i suppose every time a different group of people do it, it makes it different. rob and i were keen to elemental parts of the piece be open. so maybe the first thing we do is to take a speech at the beginning of the play spoken by a character called the bloody sergeant which is essentially the description of a battle in which macbeth is brave and fearless, interesting for a character who was fearful for most of the play. we took that away and put what he describes on stage. we wanted to do it for a couple of reasons. first, when you meet macbeth, you know a littl of what they really mean about this fearlessness, the savagery, a man you would imagine should not have the problems he has later on, when faced with another murder. in battle, he's fearless. we wanted to introduce a theatrical energy which is he can tick and hurtling which they can be viscerally be part of, the he can tick nature of the circumstances, which mean these two fundamentally at the beginning of the play good people making very bad decisions because the play, circumstance the plot, doesn't give you time to -- >> rose: ben brandy who loved the play captured that very thing. he said you hurtled forward by the beginning of the play and it had that kind of energy. >> we're all interested in this as to what goes on in the corridors of power and one thinks about why and how these two people could do this extraordinary thing. one thinks about it, it could be easy to think about it in mel dramatic terms, but this man kills a friend of his, the king, whatever, and does it swiftly and does it even though other people describe him as being conscienced. the other people dismissed the play and said it's absurd because it happens too quickly. our production was trying to say perhaps these things only happen quickly without thought. >> rose: would he have done it without his wife? >> well, she, i think, accurately describes him as being not without ambition but without the sickness. there are lots of remarks about essentially a good nature. but once he had this amazing success, the reviews are brilliant, as it were, the duncan says fantastic, i'm going to give you -- i'm planting you and you're going to be having all sorts of rewards. >> rose: a new name. yeah, exactly. you get a great big honor, but actually i'm giving my job to him h, my son, and immediately macbeth is suddenly is a man with a witch's, you know, pronouncement in his mind just a few short moments ago saying well, why should he be in the way? i'll have to either -- a step that lies in my way on which i must fall down or else or leap, which means basically murder in this context. so it's a wonderful play for putting people in this unusual and extreme position -- >> rose: but it's great, you see him opening up in a stone hedge kind of thing, and there are prophecies one by one so you have to believe something. >> what do you feel about this, in the lives of the good and the great, as it were, the power of suggestion? some people would say macbeth is a silly play because it's about a man who believes his horoscope. >> rose: i think men and women believe in myth, too. >> interesting, yeah. and this idea of what the legacy is, you know. macbeth and lady macbeth not to be able to have children or haven't had them successfully, so immortality is not guaranteed by family, so now immortality can perhaps be seized by having your name in the history books. >> rose: but the relationship between the two, she's more ambitious than he is? >> i think she's differently ambitious. we tried to bring in the savage world where she says goodbye to him and he goes off to battle. the idea whether he comes back is heavily questioned. when they do come back, we wanted to present a functioning relationship. they fancy the pants off each other and it's very passionate. >> rose: the passion comes out. >> yeah. he said years ago, there are no successful marriages in shakespeare except the macbeth, which is strange because they both die and kill a king along the way. i always thought in the first conversation with alex, for me central to the show and performance, is he adores her, and she's a natural companion for him, and i think that, you know, the breakup of the relationship -- >> rose: is she stronger or weaker? >> well, again, i would say -- you know, they both at different times invoke the dark world. >> rose: they do. she's the first one to say, i'm inviting evil into the room, we're in a world where we believe in it, audience you've just seen it because they were hanging around stones and they're scary, i'm inviting them in. she has balls enough to do it first time out. but he -- but then the balance of power within the relationship switches and she at least interestingly -- interesting from the male-female point of view -- he's the one who says let's not do it tonight, she says you have to seize the opportunity, then they get it, he becomes president as it were and she says leave everything alone. but for him, he has to be president and -- >> rose: wasn't part of that prophecy from the witches, too? scared because of what they said, so therefore he went off killing anybody. >> yeah, essentially trying to square the circle with all those things, and the key thing, who's predicted to be the father of cirntion tries to kill her and his son. his determination to leave no stone unturned means he will never sleep again and there is no satisfaction. the first moment we see him as king, he's with her and they celebrate and they walk down at the coronation and he sits down and he says, to be thus is nothing but to be safely thus. i'm here, i've got a crown and a throne, and it's nothing! >> rose: but to be safely -- to be safely thus, you know. and then a splurge of paranoia comes out. and in his royalty of nature, he's off on a -- >> rose: no one that i know of more identifies with shakespeare as a living actor today. we have a number of people who played a number of parts, but you because of so many things, producing and acting. there is the question, when you prepare to do macbeth, can you go look at every production that you can get your hands on to see olivier and to see whatever the form you could get your hand on? >> well, over the years, i suppose i have done that, but in preparation specifically for this, no, i did the opposite. there's a point i knew that i was going to do it, or at least i wanted to do it very much when i stopped looking at other productions. >> rose: that's when you thought the time is for me. >> but also that i didn't want now my brain to be taken with the brilliance of other people. so i thought we have to find our own way to it. so i stopped with the growing and understanding that i felt ready to have a go. >> rose: i read somewhere you thought about doing it way up in the future, a very futuristic. >> gliew what drew you away from that to where you are? >> this difficult thing of when you come up with a sort of what you might call a strong concept for the world of the play, and all these plays are very elastic so they can accommodate them, and shakespeare survived anything we might try and trip him up with. but many times the idea ultimately has some reductive quality. you might get, you know, in the new yornew york stock exchange y get resonance with the world of money but it's about love, the fifth act is whether the girl is going to choose the boy or whatever it might be so, ultimately it's the futuristic macbeth felt as though it potentially denied the savagery and the primitive nature of some of the motivation. attend of the play, malcolm, the new king to be, said we're going to make those who helped me hear to bto be earls, the first scote had, where people give you an honor and you won't be fighting them. >> rose: it's interesting about shakespeare, james the 5th would come to shakespeare's plays? >> yes, instead, and was the author of a famous book called demonology. so he was interested in the subject macbeth dealings with. >> rose: and got it from the chronicles yes. shakespeare was fantastically comprehensive in where he went for all his stories and he knew how to borrow and he knew how to be inspired. when we did recently cleopatra on radio, there's a famous speech in there, a bar she sat on, he talks about burned in the water. >> rose: there is a comparison they make. >> yes, certainly in terms on the central focus on a relationship between two complicated people, a powerful man with a brilliant woman, and they have sort of balancing impacts, but the botch speech in thomas north's lives of the ancient romeups, et cetera, shakespeare pilfers comprehensively so. he gathered his gatherings. >> rose: every writer -- a great writer steals a lot. >> yeah, yeah. >> rose: there is also this in terms of this, when you -- there are sillo questions and lines that you have, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, did you approach those differently? did you have a mindset about them that you wanted to, in your own vision, not because you wanted to be alike or different than anyone else who had been macbeth, but some sense of how you wanted to take these pivotal moments? >> well, they -- >> rose: and deliver them? it's an interesting question that we, for instance, on tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it seemed that it grew on bankly out of this idea that aside from the vast and dense existential howl that you might describe it as being, it is also, particularly at the beginning of the speech, sort of a speech of mourning for his wife, and in our production that sort of underlined the passion between them, that the dynamic between the simple painful personal loss of a woman that he adored through his own -- in his own strutting and fretting and idiosy, if you like, informed the way that that came, so it became very personal. we wanted to take away from the show in what we've seen in version of this play that it might be too dry. >> rose: you didn't did not want that? >> i didn't want it to be dry. >> rose: what did you want it to be? >> visceral, passionate, that there is as much emotional intelligence as philosophical intelligence. it can can get very dry because the poetry is very dense and complex. but the double-up with shakespeare is if you can connect all of that brilliance and stance, intellectual fire power at this incredible level with the sense that you're watching real, live human beings and there but for the grace of god go all of us. >> rose: dealing with all the issues everybody faces in life, life and death or jealousy or rage or guilt or in this case guilt. >> guilt, and people, my goodness, you can feel the atmosphere in the audience, when they have done swiftly within 20 minutes of the beginning of the play, in an atmosphere where the audience is backing away and the thing is throbbing, and they've done it. so they put the cold steel in the flesh of the person they knew. so king duncan getting, no, i killed one of our friends! and now what do we do? and suddenly they become like children, almost. that irrevocable moment, people may understand they may not kill a king but they will do things from which they can never recover and life will never be the same again. and you can feel those people going, oh, my god, that could be knee either because of choicous maude or things thrust upon you. >> yes, and of course it's terribly moving. people find the particular production moving. why should you feel moved or sympathetic to characters who perform such heinous acts? but somehow shakespeare's mastery allows you by the tend, when he -- allows you by the end when he loses her and when he can convey either in lady macbeth's dissent into what appears to be madness, you already sense with macbeth at the end, the bleakness in his soul is so profound, it's chilling. the glimpse of a kind of dark eternity that he shows us is so terrifying that you can't help but be moved because the price he has paid for this moment of reckless ambition is so deep and profound as to shake one to the very core on his behalf. >> rose: and lead to his death? >> yeah, yeah. and one thing, isn't it strange, you know, at the end, we talked about, he's fearless in battle at the beginning. through the powerful of suggestion he is fearful and guilt-ridden, dream-laden and sleep-deprived for most of the play. and right at the end, what does he have left that shakespeare seems to admire in some of his male characters, particularly the soldier potes poets, he has! you know, so he's right there at the end, i'm going to kiss the ground before malcolm's feet. the forest moved, and you weren't born of woman, you know what? come and get it. it's sort of a ridiculous quality. shakespeare says, what else do you have? show me something! and he hangs in there. somehow there's a profound respect for this. so i never ran away. and he talks to her and compliments them both. two times he uses the word "dauntless. he add myers that and shakespeare admires that people no matter what life throws at them they put one foot in front of the other and get up. what else can you do? shakespeare says that. it ought to feel grander than that but sometimes all there is to do is show up. >> rose: in your own pantheon, is there a one, two, three among shakespeare's works? >> oh, gosh, what a question. your life changes and -- >> rose: you have more experience, seen more. >> you react differently to things. it's so comprehensive. you've had many different conversations with harold bloom who said shakespeare invented the human. the polish scholar in the '60s called him our contemporary. john guilder says playing hamlet sums up the process of living. i feel that applies many of these plays. now one's soul is shaken by what macbeth does to the audience. we are there. we are the lucky vessels through which this thing passes, currently, in this particular show. >> rose: five minutes before you're going on, what are you doing? what are you thinking? what are you saying to yourself? >> i'm meditating is what i'm doing. >> rose: clearing your mind? yeah, i'm getting ready. my favorite quote from shakespeare is the end of hamlet, the readiness is all, and it applies to everything. my whole day is getting ready for that moment. that's all i do. people say, are you having a wonderful time in new york? well, yes, but partly because i'm at the theater hours and hours and hours before any sane human being would be. i do my meditation, i listen to tapes, i read, do the lines every day, you do the whole plays in varying ways, you trick yourself to keep it fresh. five minutes before you go on, you meditate. i swear this is the most fantastic thing to be able to do. i mean, it's really tingly and you know it's not an easy thing to do, given if one's aware of the sort of effort of it in terms of what we do, but it's absolutely glorious, glorious thing to do. i sometimes feel like i'm a big fan of sports, generally, and it feels like you're in the tunnel waiting to come out before a huge gauge and it's like tournament tennis or something. some of it's up here, some in the body. in our case we start with a five-minute battle. >> rose: just revs you up. oh, man. because we have to practice the fights every day. it's dangerous, raining, in the dark, 25 enormously butch fellows coming at us with cold steel. >> rose: you have to be athletic, too. >> it's an all-consume thing. i think i've learned more about the discipline for doing this on this particular job than ever before. >> rose: great to have you. thanks very much. >> rose: back in a moment. stay with us. >> rose: mark rilance is here, won a tony for bowing bowing in 2007 and second tony for jerusalem in 2011. back on broad way at the velasco theater playing the lead in two shakespeare plays, king third and richard in olivia. he served as artistic director from 1995 to 2005. charles isserwood of the "new york times" says his presence provides a miniature acting class in shakespearean acting. welcome. >> thanks, charlie. >> rose: what a nice tribute from mr.isherwood. >> yes. >> rose: how did this happen, these two plays for you to come show your stuff? >> it's taken years. the artist and director and clothing designer and set director and the musical director and the kind of core players were people that worked with me a lot when i was artistic director at the globe, and when my ten years finished, i immediately set about wanting to, i suppose, preserve or carry on the essential core work of what we did, which was a very careful, and i hope, rigorous attempt to explore what i call original playing practices, what we know of them from shakespeare's day. so it took a long time. we had to figure a way of mounting two productions. it would be popular enough to raise enough money to make a whole new wardrobe of clothes, as the elizabethans spent their money on what they wore on their backs, and with six slide musicians. >> rose: what was the term you eyed in terms of original production. >> original playing practices or original practices. that's what inspired sam wannamaker, the american who founded the globe, which is there should not only be an intellectual inquiry into the plays and what shakespeare imagined when he wrote the wonderful plays, but there should be a laboratory where you could explore with a live audience and live players. so he spent the last 25 years building the globe theater and died in '93, and i became artistic director in '95, and his thinking about the globe was really the inspiration for me which was he demand three things -- very, very thorough research, accurate materials -- so we fought very hard for the building to be thatched since the great fire, i think a thousand oak trees went into it, lime plaster, all kinds of old building techniques -- and that original craft should be used as well. >> rose: and the premise was we should be more inside of shakespeare's head if we did that? >> well, we would learn -- we might learn -- we would learn more about the reason he wrote the plays and the way he wrote them. we would be able to look at questions of the amount of time it takes, how fast did they speak, how fast did they play, were the plays cut to two hours, were they played very rapidly to make it two hours? was it two hours just to do with amphitheaters and where they played a longer time at indoor playing houses? for an actor, the space is remarkable because there is no lighting or it's daylight. they only played in the afternoon. there are two whopping great pillars, so there is nowhere you can stand where some people in the audience will be able to see you, but everyone can hear you like a bell. a commentator if they went to the globe would say i went to hear julius caesar. they never went to see a play, they went to hear it at the globe. so it demanded in my time a lot more rigor and work on eloquence. >> rose: before we talk about the two plays, ten years as artistic director of the globe theater. >> yeah. >> rose: if you asked to give a last lecture about shakespeare, what would you want us to know? >> the word that comes to the top of my head, immediately, may not be the deepest answer, is you will never get to the bottom of his sense of humor, his sense of wit and humor. obviously, it's well known that one of the great things he does a marrying opposites, juxtaposing, opposing sounds, hot, ice, cold, fire, these things romeo says at one point but also juxtaposing tragedy and comedy, and his deep sense of humor even in the most tragic moments still staggers me. i don't generally find it in myself. i find it p in performance with an audience. >> rose: the audience tells you what's humorous. >> i come to feel there is a collective thing that happens when a whole group of people focus on something, maybe religions have known this forever, but it happens in theater as well, if you get a whole audience focusing on one topic or one story in the case of shakespeare and they're all in the same roornlings it feels each of our individual minds are capable of something more when we're together focused on something, as if the internet is just a manifestation of something that exists naturally in human consciousness, that there is a collective consciousness in the room. >> rose: imrowm that the coalescing of everything is much larger than the sum of the individual parts. >> yeah. so the wit, particularly in the globe, which unlike is more rectangular or square shape, and the globe is a circular shape, obviously, and that collective experience for playing -- of playing there ten years really awakened this to a more accepts of humor in the author, is the thing i would say that i would hope would take a long time before the universe destroys that. >> rose: your interest in shakespeare goes way back to high school, doesn't it? >> it does, yeah. i skipped the rest of the parts and just played hamlet at 16. (laughter) >> rose: yeah, but you've since played hamlet, roam know, macbeth, olivier. >> i think i have been in 62 productions of plays of shakespeare and his contemporaries, middleton, people at the time, yeah. >> rose: is there any better training for an actor? >> i would have thought there are much finer actors to me. >> rose: no, to really get your teeth into shakespeare and shakespearean characters, is that the best possible training for an actor? >> no, i wouldn't say that. >> rose: you would snnlt. i'm not of the opinion shakespeare should be loved by everyone or is meant for everyone. >> rose: or somehow because to have the range, would give you an opportunity to really dig deep into understanding human nature, there have understanding acting, therefore a larger ability to inhabit different characters. >> depends on how you approach it, doesn't it? picasso, you and i could get a set of the same set of paints that picasso used to necessarily come up with the same thing, i don't know. it depends. >> rose: because it doesn't come from the paint, it comes from the head. >> yeah, it comes from your life and how -- what -- the way in which you deal with the shakespearean material. but i don't know that robert mitchum or spencer tracy or montgomery clift or brando -- brando actually gives one of the best shakespearean performances in my taste of marc antony. yo>> rose: why is brando as marc antony so good? >> because he's so present. to me, i totally believe those words have never been said before and he absolutely needs to convince the friends, the roman, the countrymen of -- >> rose: that's been said before at this table, convince people that these words have never been said before, and i have just thought them. >> yeah. >> rose: thank you for coming. oh, my pleasure. >> rose: great to have you here. >> rose: stephen fry is here an actor, comedian, write, television presenter, documentary film maker, within to prison and cambridge, thought he would devote his life to shakespeare. he's playing in shakespeare's twelfth night. welcome. >> nice to be here, charlie. >> rose: how is it to be on broadway? >> it's wonderful. >> rose: this production started in london. >> the outdoor globe theater sam wannamaker made. the globe is like a table, and this is tv's wooden o. all the great ideas that get expanded. so you have half of it people standing called the yard, they're called the groundlings and they would have paid a penny, and there are the aristocracy, where they would fit and watch. now people queue in long time to get the standing up seats, you know what i mean, because they love it. and the relationship you have with the audience is utterly unique. there is nothing like it. you realize every soliloquy is a conversation. it's an original practices cast. >> rose: the original practice. >> yeah, so every single element of the play is, as far as we scholastically know, absolutely as it would have been in shakespeare's day. we know in 1602, it was performed indoors in the middle temple which is one of the legal medieval halls the lawyers used, and it hasn't changed since that day. we know this happened a lot because during the hours of day height you can use the wooden o and the outdoor theater happily, and you have the whole rest of the year to keep your actors from starvation so you go to lawyer's halls, cambridge, colleges, and houses of nobility and play your plays there. this new one was written for an indoor theater. you can sort of tell, and for intelligent lawyers and people to come and watch. it's not a difficult play. it's hilarious and rambunctious and fast. >> rose: did you want to be a shakespearean scholar? >> it's the thing i was best at at university. >> rose: came bridge? yes. i found it easiest to write on shakespeare and loved performing his plays at cambridge and i thought i would do a thesis on shakespeare. one of my contemporaries jonathan bait i bate. >> mon vocallia means ill will. there is a character that means ill will. and there are these connections because there is viola and olivia. so there are lots of those characters. then there is the stewart to olivia the countess who is in mourning and the father and brother died and she's in charge of this estate. she has an uncle, a chamber maid and she has a fool, and the nearby duke is in love with her but she won't have anything to do with her and she swears seven years to wear a veil and not look at a man. a ship wreck happens, twin brother and sister each believed the other drowned. the sea captain who rescued her, she asked him, what will i do, my brother drowned? she said dress me as a man and take me to the local ruler and present me as a eunuch so i will be as a boy. so she dresses as a boy, calls herself susario and serves olivia and starts to fall in love with him but we know she's a girl. so it's weird. sebastian survived, looks the same, and he's been taken around by antonio, a pirate, who fell in love with him, we don't know in what way, but the language is pretty strong. it talks about his absolute devotion and pure love as he called it for sebastian. they never meet until the final moment where they suddenly are on stage both at the same time looking identical and they both go -- antonio says, are you sebastian? he says how can you doubt it? how can you make a division of yourself? and they look at each other an can't believe it. and it means that viola can actually marry sebastian, a man who looks exactly the same as the girl she thought she wanted to marry and the girl can marry the duke. meanwhile, i have terrible tricks played on me because i'm me and i like to be the bossda and i'm pleased with myself and i think everyone adores me. they play a trick on me by leaving a secret letter that looks like it's from the countess who says she loves me and tells me to wear particularly clothes, yellow stockings, cross gartering, and she hates that and is not in the mood for people smiling when she's grieving for her late father. so it makes me look a fool and ends up in prison. >> rose: so tell me how you approached and what was it for you as an actor to get inside of malvolio? >> some people may say he's a pompous, self-regarding ass, therefore it took very little of a stretch. (laughter) people often find it very pretentious anytime an actor opens his mouth. our job is to entertain people. but when asked we politely answer. you have to see it from his point of view. malvilio thinks he's keeping the house calm and thinks the influences of the fool and mariah are bad and he thinks he will make a wonderful husband for olivia. there are local references to times when some servant married their mistress or master. so he goes off into a fantasy land. other people played him as quite which could or comic. >> rose: thank you for coming. thank you, charlie. >> rose: john lythgoe is here, won emmis for his television performances, work on stage and oscar nominated for work in the film. h he's playing king lear, a free shakespeare in the park production, plays in new york central park through august 17. i am pleased to have john lythgoe on this program to talk about lear. thank you for coming. >> thank you for having me. >> rose: how do the play and the program come together? >> i have been nagging oscar to consider me for it. probably -- the first i mentioned it to him was probably long before i should have played it. but now i think i've just entered that interesting window of opportunity for lear when you're young enough to play it because you still have the strength but old enough to play it because you can bring a little bit of authenticity, an old man losing his viability. >> rose: you did an amazing thing which is you kept a diary of preparation. how did the preparation start? >> well, for me, i've lived a long, 68-year-old life. so i did age. that was my first preparation. but i ebegan working hard on it in march. i stopped shaving, of course. this is a real beard, charlie. and i hired a u.c.l.a. grad student to just sit with me and cue me on words. it went extremely fast. i knew it better than i realized. i've seen it so many times in my life. i played the role of gloucester in college, but i figured it's going to be such a demanding part, the rehearsal period is going to be so tough, the last thing i want to do is to go home and study words in the night. so i learned it completely cold by the first day of rehearsal. the first time i've ever done that. and sure enough, i mean, it was a process of stamina building, rehearsing it. >> rose: talk about learning it. you said you had a u.c.l.a. student come in. he would cue you so that you would know the lines that led to your lines? >> well, he would just sit and listen, correct me as i -- actually, in my days on third rock from the sun, i worked out an extremely efficient way of memorizing great gobs of material because it came at you very fast and it was a very, very wordy and fast-paced show. i trained my assistant to feed me my lines with a three-minute pause between -- a three-second pause between every single word, including a, and and the. and i would drill the line in all those pauses, and i could learn a speech like that once through. that's how i went about -- >> rose: the idea of memorizing things is a great fascination for me. >> well, and it gets harder as you get older. >> rose: and making speeches so you don't have to refer to notes, that whole thing. >> right. and with lear, there is also a superb internal logic to the writing. somehow or another, i've absorbed it over the years, all those brilliant and vivid speeches. >> rose: what is the challenge of playing it outside? >> it's less of a challenge than a marvelous opportunity. it's a big play full of gigantic passions and gigantic ideas, and i'm a very, very tall actor. >> rose: yeah. it's as big as the big outdoors, and, you know, doing the delacorte with this hungry audience, the audience of passionate new york theatergoers who waited all day to get their tickets, they're so hungry for it, they're completely gripped by it. when the elements come along, we've had two nights of rain, and yet we've performed the thing i didn't think way. they stay right with us, in fact. they think it's even better in the rain. after all, i do get to say blow winds -- (laughter) >> rose: the idea so many great actors have performed this, did preparation include watching, understanding, looking at those performances not to imitate them, but just to understand the range of interpretation? >> well, i calculated i've seen ten productions of lear over the years, and you certainly remember all sorts of things about individual performances. i remember them all. the most vivid, i think, was the very first couple of times i saw it. i saw paul scofield do it in that great production of 1964. >> rose: who directed that? peter brook. and it was like i saw that three nights ago, i saw it so vividly. this year i stopped, there have been a lot of lears and i stopped seeing them. i think the last one was derek jacoby. i didn't see frank or simon russell behl or pennington, there have been a lot of them, but at a certain point i had to make it completely my own with no one sitting on my shoulder. >> rose: was it a production put on by your father? >> he did put it on. when he put king lear on, i was seven years old and my parents knew i wouldn't last till the end. no, the first time i saw it was in 1962, the first season of shakespeare in the park at the delacorte with frank in the role and it completely throttled me. you remember the impact of the play like. this it was the first time i ever saw death of a salesman. >> rose: speaking of death of a salesman, are there other things you very much want to play that, when you look at all the things you've done, are there missing elements for you in terms of great characters? >> i'd say the only one was king lear. >> rose: yeah. i don't have nil bucket list -- i don't have any bucket list play or part anymore. i'm about to do a delicate balance on broadway and i'm thrilled to do that, but it's not something i have been waiting my whole career to do. king lear is. in my experience, all the most exciting things i've done have been other people's bright ideas, things i never thought of myself for. other people think of you sometimes in ways you don't think of yourself. >> rose: tell me who he is. who is lear? >> well, in our lear, he is -- we see him as a kind of exuberant and manic and exciting man, a beloved monarch, but he's aging to the point where he's probably always had a strain of manic temper, and it is dan sullivan's wonderful concept, my opinion, that the first time you see him, he's extremely excited about this plan for dividing his kingdom, like he's something he just thought of and hasn't really thought through yet, and you get a sense of him being a very robust man with a huge heart and great sense of humor, but he's aged more than people realize and -- >> rose: some people ask the question, is he mad from the beginning, or does he lose his mind over the process of the play? >> that's an extremely good question, and it's the number one challenge, is calculating how he goes mad. i think there is the beginnings of a propensity for madness. i think when he explodes completely irrationally add cordelia, it's a shock to her. she's probably seen his temper before but she's never seen it that insane. this is the person in his whole life that he loves the most and it's almost because to have the intensity of that love that his anger at her has such intensity. so, for everyone, it's a new shock. gonorail and regan talk about how we have been seeing more and more of. this then in succeeding scenes you see different versions of madness as he declines into real dearrangement and dementia. and the entire challenge with dan sullivan's exquisite guidance is finding the benchmarks, finding the moments that, for an example, the moment when his madness, he has these huge, huge temper tantrums with his daughters, all three of them. that propels him a certain assistance toward madness -- a certain distance toward madness. but then she's shut out in a wild and crazy storm. then he meets a mad beggar and the site of that -- sight of that mad beggar, poor tom a beggar in disguise, kicks it into another degree. suddenly he sees, this is the solution! this is an accommodative man, no more such a poor bare-forked animal as thou art. scales fall from his eyes. he's going mad but it's taking him toward. >> rose: he's coming through to some kind of vision. >> madness is cauterizing wounds, it's clearing his brain in a lot of ways. >> rose: when you recite shakespeare and speak shakespeare do you feel i am so in touch with the gods of expression? i feel likes it's like a musician sight reading marvelous chamber music. a lot of shakespeare is familiar to me by now but a lot of classical music is familiar to musicians, it's just -- i read those speeches, and they -- you know, there is this incredible intersection of poetry and emotion that shakespeare, to me, it's the very best example of that. you can look at it purely in terms of the beauty of the language, or you can look at it in terms of the power and shakespeare's extraordinary empathy. well, he manages to do the same thing with the same phrases. you know that thing that i just quoted you -- >> rose: where do you put lear in all the characters you have played in shakespeare? >> well i actually have not done that much shakespeare. i've done about 20 plays but most was before i was 20 and in small roles. >> rose: macbeth. i did play macbeth in college. i played malvolio with the royal shakespeare company a few years ago, but this is the first time i've taken on one of the gigantic roles. >> rose: do you wish you had done more? >> yeah, i stupidly turned down hamlet a few times. i had other things to do. >> rose: was it other things like television? >> i think it was other plays. >> rose: plays and movies. or -- >> rose: because there is this soft of thing that people who are not of the theater think -- that would be me -- that every actor feels like -- that's worth his salt feels like i have to take on hamlet. you didn't feel that? >> i didn't have a burning desire. i have to tell you, to be honest, what i like working on most is new material. i love working with writers and creating something that nobody has seen before. i think there may be something eatable going observe. this was very much my father's world and i'm a terrible snob, i only want to be in great productions of shakespeare. >> rose: thank you for joining us. see you next time. for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> explore new worlds and new ideas through programs like this made available for everyone through contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> the effects of unmanaged stress are a major risk factor in almost every serious modern disease, including heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, and even dementia. but it doesn't have to be that way. >> announcer: dr. martin rossman is a clinical faculty member at the university of california medical school and a pioneer in the study of the healing power of the mind. >> mind-body medicine is simply the term we use for using your mind to support the powerful healing abilities already built

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