Actor Sir Simon Russell Beale is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest actors of his generation. He has played many leading roles at National Theatre and RSC, including Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. He is currently starring in Titus Andronicus at the RSC. His awards include three Olivier Awards, two BAFTAs, and a Tony Award in 2022 for his leading role in The Lehman Trilogy, which had transferred from London. Simon Russell Beale was knighted in 2019 for services to drama.
Simon tells John Wilson about his childhood and his visits to his family in the boarding school holidays at their home in Penang and Singapore. Trained as a chorister from an early age, he reveals how J.S. Bach's St Matthew Passion evokes the thrill of singing at his choir school. Simon very nearly embarked on a career in music before switching to drama and tells John about the significance of the Macbeth soliloquy that began a lifetime love of Shakespeare. He also reveals the central role that pubs play in the learning of his lines.Producer: Edwina Pitman
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43:56
Maggie O'Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell is the author of nine novels. Her debut, After You’d Gone, was published 25 years ago this year and won the Betty Trask Prize in 2001. Her 2010 book The Hand That First Held Mine won the Costa Novel Award; and Hamnet, her hugely acclaimed and bestselling story of the death of Shakespeare’s son, won the 2020 Women’s Prize for fiction. Maggie O’Farrell has also written a memoir; I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. Maggie tells John Wilson about some of her creative influences including the Finnish writer Tove Jansson, whose book Moominland Midwinter she first read at the age of eight when she was ill in bed, suffering from encephalitis. The poet Michael Donaghy gave Maggie valuable writing advice when she attended his poetry workshops at City University and inspired her with his recitations of poetry from memory. Maggie also reveals how seeing a David Hockney photomontages called The Scrabble Game hugely influenced the way she constructs narrative and time-frame in her novels.Producer: Edwina Pitman
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43:49
Abi Morgan
Screenwriter and playwright Abi Morgan has worked across a diverse array of themes and genres for more than 25 years. She wrote the television series The Split, a domestic drama involving divorce lawyers, and created the psychological Netflix series Eric. Her other television credits include Sex Traffic, for which she won a BAFTA for Best Drama serial in 2005, and The Hour, the television news drama which earned her an Emmy award in 2012. Her film credits include The Iron Lady, which starred Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher; historical drama Suffragette; and Shame, co-written with the director Steve McQueen. Her recent book This Is Not A Pity Memoir recounts her husband’s recovery after serious illness, and her own treatment for cancer. Abi Morgan tells John Wilson about her childhood in a theatrical family; her father was the director Gareth Morgan and her mother is the actor Pat England. She chooses the author, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron as an important influence, and particularly the film Heartburn which Ephron adapted from her semi-autobiographical divorce novel Heartburn. Abi Morgan also recalls the work of television screenwriter Kay Mellor, whose series Band Of Gold and Playing The Field also influenced her own writing. She describes how seeing an exhibition of the work of artist Cornelia Parker, including her installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, inspired some of Abi’s early theatre work including her plays Splendour and The Mistress Contract. Producer Edwina Pitman
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43:28
Theaster Gates
The internationally acclaimed and hugely influential artist Theaster Gates was born, raised and works in Chicago. He trained as a ceramicist, and still makes pottery, but it’s just one part of a diverse artistic output that also includes painting, sculpture and vast installations, in works which often explore the black experience in contemporary America. He is best known for redeveloping derelict buildings for community projects, using art to transform run-down neighbourhoods of his city. A recipient of the prestigious Artes Mundi Prize, Gates is a professor at the University of Chicago and received the French government’s prestigious Légion d’Honneur. Theaster Gates is part of the creative team behind the Barack Obama Presidential Centre currently under construction in Chicago.
In 2022 he created the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London, a piece called Black Chapel which was conceived as a monument to his father. His most recent exhibition is 1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise at White Cube gallery.Theaster Gates tells John Wilson about the influence of his family upbringing. The youngest of nine siblings, and the only boy, he recalls assisting his father as he worked as a roofer. Later, when he was an established artist, and having inherited his father's tools and tar kettle, Theaster began to make paintings using hot bitumen in tribute to his father's labour. He also explains how, as a high achieving pupil, he was 'bussed' to a predominantly white school far from his home neighbourhood, and benefited from cultural opportunities that he may not have received otherwise. He also chooses the experience of spending a year in Japan learning ancient pottery techniques, and beginning his practise as a ceramicist. Producer Edwina Pitman
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43:38
David Hare
The premiere of David Hare’s play Plenty at the National Theatre in 1978 marked him out as one of the UK’s most skilled and socially conscious playwrights. Plenty transferred to Broadway, Hare adapted it into a film starring Meryl Streep, and in the following years he became known as a writer for whom the political and the personal are deeply entwined. Often referred to as Britain’s pre-eminent ‘state of the nation playwright’, his plays in the 1980s examined a wide range of social and political issues, including the Church of England in Racing Demon, the judiciary in Murmuring Judges and party politics in The Absence of War. He tackled international geopolitics in Via Dolorosa - about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and the invasion of Iraq with Stuff Happens and the Vertical Hour. Equally skilled as a screenwriter, his film screenplays for The Hours and The Reader saw him twice nominated for Academy Awards. David Hare was knighted in 1998 for ‘services to theatre’. He talks to John Wilson about how his lower-middle class background and family life in Bexhill-on-Sea stimulated his imagination. He pays tribute to some of the most formative people in his life: his Cambridge university tutor, the Welsh writer and academic Raymond Williams, whose maxim that ‘culture is ordinary’ had a profound effect on his life as a writer; the actress Kate Nelligan, who starred in several of Hare's plays, including Plenty; and his wife Nicole Farhi who, he says, transformed his idea of himself and who inadvertently helped inspire one of his best loved plays, Skylight. Producer: Edwina Pitman
In-depth conversations with some of the world's leading artists and creatives across theatre, visual arts, music, dance, film and more. Hosted by John Wilson.
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