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Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
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I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins.
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Polly and Morgan are the co-founders of The Base, a company production they built that does something existing institutions have abandoned.
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They take the Western canon seriously.
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Both were trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Rada, and have worked in British film, television, and theatre for nearly 20 years.
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In this conversation, Ollie, Morgan, and I think out loud about why the Edinburgh Fringe has become a monument to progressive ideology, why the Royal Shakespeare Company is rehearsing a lesbian Othello set against the climate crisis, why not a single pro-Brexit play was produced in a country that voted 52% to leave, why the head of Rada admits he knows nothing about acting, why the arts establishment that claims to care about the working class has spent 30 years calling them racists, and what it means to build something new from the ruins.
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This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, bespoke academic tutoring for children who deserve to be stretched and not managed.
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If your child needs more than their school is giving them, visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
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And, if you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
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And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
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V.
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Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
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Episodes 1 and 2 are live now on YouTube.
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Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins.
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British theatre was once the envy of the civilized world.
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Shakespeare, Marlowe, Wilde, and it was produced on stages which formed the moral imagination of the English-speaking peoples.
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And then I think it's fair to say that the institutions were captured by the same progressivism that has captured all of the other institutions, whether public or private.
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And they've been captured by those people who no longer believe in that tradition.
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And today I have Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins, two rather trained actors who still work inside those institutions, but are now building something outside them to escape the destruction.
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And they call it the base.
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And this conversation is about what they're doing in the base.
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Morgan, Ollie, thanks so much for joining me.
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Thank you so much, John.
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Genuine, genuine privilege to be here.
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Yeah, thanks for having us, John.
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Pleasure's all mine.
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Let's begin with what the base is, what it is that you do, and who is it that that comes to what it is that you do?
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Sure.
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So in a nutshell, the base is a production company run by myself and Morgan Watkins.
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We always say that we have three main strands to what we do.
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One is the classics, we do rehearsed readings, and in the future we will do performances on the classics in a faithful way, a rigorous way, which we can we can go into what that means later.
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We want to carve out a space for new writers to be genuinely dangerous and experimental and talk about the world as they find it.
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And we want to create spaces where we rigorously train actors and writers to the high standard that you mentioned at the beginning that English, the the the English-speaking world was famous for and was has been part of our soft power throughout throughout the world.
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As you say, Morgan and I met at Rada.
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We trained at Rada, leaving in 2009.
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So we'd been friends for a very, very long time, like 20 years now.
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And yeah, we always stayed in touch.
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We worked within the industry, film, TV, and theatre.
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And around about 2016, things started to, as you know, and you've had many conversations about things started to kind of go off the rails a little bit.
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Um, and Morgan and I were talking through all this time.
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This got to a head in 2020, obviously, 2021.
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And we were just talking as friends, staying up to date with everything.
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We found solace in each other.
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We seemed to be the only people in the industry who thought that what was going on was a bit mad and a bit mental and a bit not good.
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So then we started talking about actually doing something about it.
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We weren't just going to sit by and watch this industry that we love, this craft that we love just be turned into nothingness.
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So we, yeah, we set up the base, we started doing rehearsed readings.
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Well, I should say before that we'd started to go to conversations at places like Unheard and these other places that were popping up.
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And we were really excited that these interesting conversations were going on with these kind of new intellectuals, um, and they were talking about things that really seemed to matter and that were very um yeah, very pertinent to the modern world.
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And then you go to the theatre, and it would be like, oh, well, this is really boring, and everybody knows exactly what to think and feel about everything.
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So we thought, let's do something about it.
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We tried to put on these readings where we actually investigate and learn about the classics, but we also try and match our world of culture, particularly theatre and drama, with some of the new intellectuals, people like yourself, uh, people like many of the guests you've had on.
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We would invite them to come and give a response to these classical texts.
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We have discussions, and through that it's it's grown and we've gathered uh gathered lots of people.
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We have lots of students coming.
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That was one of our aims with the base was to try and drag people out of these institutions, ideally get them before they went to the institutions.
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So it is a real mixed bag, the people who who follow us, but I suppose what unites them is a dissatisfaction with the culture industry as it stands and a feeling that we can that we can do better than this.
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Morgan, uh Ollie was just saying that the objective of being faithful and bringing some rigour to dealing with the texts, the the plays is a key driver for the base.
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Can you uh have you been in the position of working with the institutions which you grew disillusioned with on the same kind of text that you're doing?
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And and is there a is there how would you describe the difference between the orientation of the people running some Shakespeare readings and uh and trying to uh rehearse for a play in the modern progressive mindset compared to how it is that what you two are doing at the base?
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Yeah, uh it's it's very very different.
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I think uh there is a lot of shame uh around the Western canon, and I think it's kind of morphed itself into some kind of sort of uh sort of campification of the whole thing or something, some something like that.
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Then so I think we were sort of, yeah, Ollie's perfectly described the the company's kind of uh sort of intellectual genesis, uh, but uh with we I think we were we were reacting against sort of two things against sort of woke culture and the sort of censoriousness that that created in the industry, and that created in in the c in classrooms, on on TV sets, on film sets, in writers' rooms, on in plays, of course, and we it what it was just very unpleasant.
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Uh it was it was wrong.
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I it was it it was the wrong energy to have in the artistic world was to have a lack of freedom in in thought, a lack of freedom in investigation in into subject matter, and and that should be that was always always my drive as an artist, even though I was kind of indoctrinated in the sort of left-wing world in many ways, I still had that kind of curiosity about the the human condition and and and human situation.
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And I think woke culture was was crushing that, was crushing that spirit, you know, and and and and we couldn't ask certain questions, characters couldn't be portrayed in certain ways, everything suddenly had to kind of conform to these new ideological rules that were being imposed on us by the kind of the rising of woke wokeness within the kind of ideology.
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It was sort of it was almost, you know, it obviously there's no point really going into like what wokeness is here, but it's kind of it's some form of leftism, some form of sort of cultural Marxism kind of uh uh breeding itself further and further into the industries and into the way of thinking to people, and therefore you you begin to feel suffocated because it becomes more and more powerful and more and more frightening to kind of push back and to say, I don't know if that would happen, or would he really say that?
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And could that be there?
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And so that was, I think that was kind of that was one of my main concerns was was the was that.
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And in terms of like kind of to set to kind of move into the to the question more specifically, I think with with the classics and with the world that me and Ollie have really promoted, there was just a complete disregard of the classics, actually.
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It was they they were sort of seen as like this kind of old world that isn't that useful, and it's and it was a big thing was they the whiteness of the classics.
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I think that was a kind of there was a sense where you were feel you were made to feel shame about reading white males.
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And this feels a bit dated now because we're it we're sort of a bit beyond this, aren't we?
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We're in 2026, but that was actually quite a big thing at one point, you know.
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There was there was like people were scared to say, I'm reading Tolstoy or something, because you could feel like the comeback would be, oh, why are you reading a white man, a dead white man?
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And uh I I think we've almost forgotten how radioactive things like that were about 10 years ago.
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And so there was this kind of shame around the Western canon, and it was connected to wokeness, and and then I I I I noted, I just felt like well, we've got these sort of two big problems.
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We've got this the shame around the Western canon, wokeness kind of destroying everything, and we need to counter both of those things, right?
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We need to have pride in the Western canon, we actually don't know the Western canon well enough, and so that's kind of a sort of two-pronged thing that I think me and Ollie were trying to deal with was like the lack of freedom and then this this shame around the Western canon.
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So we were like, unapologetically, we're gonna start a company that kind of that that revels in the Western canon and studies the Western canon and effectively emits a great amount of humility towards the Western Canon, because I think we also, me and Ollie didn't quite know enough about the Western Canon, and we still don't, right?
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You know, we're still we're learning, but we wanted to bring that kind of pride back into it.
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And when you study the Western Canon, it it's very vital and it's it's very it's very complex, there's there's much in it, and the the rooms I was in to kind of finally get around to your question in some ways is that the it the the the it had been taken over completely by what I would perhaps see as kind of quite feminized, quite campified version of the West's history, and so and I I wanted to counter that.
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I wanted to I said, no, no, I don't think this play is about that or this, and uh we need to we need to kind of explore the vitality and the danger and the and the masculinity of these characters and not be ashamed of that.
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And so I I I think I just wanted to counter that, or even okay, this is John, just to even let me try and really get into this here is that in scenes in drama, there is often a direct conflict between the sexes as an example, right?
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The scene, the play itself is about that.
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When you can no longer discuss what that even is, you can't even explore the scene, and so you're going into drama schools and you're having to do talk about a scene, and you're actually not allowed to frame the scene in its correct context.
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You have to frame it in a sort of genderless context, otherwise, you're gonna offend everyone.
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And that was something I saw.
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And I actually know a famous, a really famous teacher left a drama school, and on her last day, she said to them, Can I just tell you that some scenes are about women and some scenes are about men?
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And the this is really important in the drama, and we had to we had to counsel that.
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I had to counsel that as an individual, and me and Oli have to counsel that as a company.
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We have to look at this and we have to take it head on and say, No, I'm not gonna be ashamed to say that Romeo and Juliet is about the love between a man and a woman, and a young man and a young woman.
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And so, yes, I I I've spoken quite a lot there, but I think it's probably probably a fair bit in there to kind of riff off.
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Well, a few things to riff off.
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One, the campification of the the the theatrical world, um, but two this point you make about hyper-egalitarianism, a neutralising of differences, but I would say only when it comes to relations between men and women, because you can find thousands of examples of when difference is totally celebrated.
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So I'll give an example.
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I'm as the crow flies about 80 miles south of Edinburgh, famous for the fringe festival.
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Uh that that festival started in the 1940s, I think.
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It used to be uh it wasn't programmed, it was just uninvited people would come and they would do shows, and now it's fully programmed.
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And the program tells you about the ideological proclivities of the people who put them on.
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And it shows perfectly what Eric Kaufman talks about in taboo, this progressive capture of cultural institutions.
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It's the natural result of self-selecting of a self-selective monoculture through hiring, through funding, through programming.
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And the French programme for 2026.
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Here are a few examples of what uh of what has been put on.
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You've got Capitalism, three gays tried to fix the economy.
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That's capitalism examined through a quote, distinctly queer lens.
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Then you've got Slayers, a one-woman show about the manosphere's effects on women.
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Peregrinations, migration explored through, quote, stories of courage, loss, and resilience, unquote, reveal how borders become inscribed on human identity.
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Uh Confessions of a mulatto love child, a bold intimate piece about identity.
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You know, it goes, it goes on and on.
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Uh and um I suppose what I'm trying to say is this is the very perfect example of that San Franciscan revolution of the valorization of the self and of the minoritization of peoples.
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Um, and I suppose as two people who both are still part of the incumbent institutions, some of them are very fancy buildings and long histories, but very hollowed out of substance, as our friend and colleague Pierre Darangsa has argued, um you're also building something new.
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So I suppose my question then, uh open to either of you, whoever gets to it first, fingers on the buzzer, is the fr is is are places like the fringe recoverable?
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Or once you reach that certain density of ideological monoculture, is it time to do a Henry VIII dissolution?
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That's the only way forward.
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Um I would certainly not be against a dissolution of of the fringe.
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And I think your list is very is very helpful there because I there some people kind of believe that this happened, but we've moved on.
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And as you as you rightly provide evidence for, we we haven't.
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It's it's still going on.
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To give you another example, the RSC in rehear are in rehearsals at the moment for a lesbian Othello set against the backdrop of the climate crisis, right?
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And I think it's an interesting question, isn't quite what you asked, but I will hopefully get around to it.
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It's an interesting question to go, where did this where did this come from?
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Because I think most people would recognise that this is a kind of endpoint that's that's just really silly, and is the is the result of well I'll try and get into what it's the result of, but at least we can try and agree that this where we are now is silly, right?
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But I would say that it is the result of a couple of generations of attitude to theatre specifically, um, and that's what we're trying to redress.
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I think okay, before I go into that, I'll just just answer your question a bit more directly.
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Part of the whole point of setting up is the base that we we came to the conclusion that the institutions were not reformable.
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We know the people who run them.
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We know them.
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Unless the incentive structure is completely changed and the educational feed pipeline is completely changed.
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I I just don't think they're going to be reformable.
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The very best thing, best case scenario is they might try and go back to pre-woke situation, which is what a lot of theatres are trying to do.
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It's kind of not working.
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The people who work in their bars, the users of theatre are still are still very woke and they're still exerting quite a lot of pressure on them.
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So that was always our starting place.
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But I would argue that this and s this this silly uh point that we've got in now is actually the result of like a couple of generations ago bad decisions.
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And the decisions were that they um they thought that culture was like a permanent thing.
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There's an interview with Peter Brook where he does this Hamlet where he's cut it all apart and done lots of crazy things to it.
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And he says, I'm allowed to do this because the book, Shakespeare's Hamlet, exists in the library, and that's there, and that's not gonna change, so I can do whatever the hell I like with it.
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And that was the sort of boomer liberal attitude to culture.
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All these theatre directors, Peter Brooke, David Hare.
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They were reacting themselves to a very stuffy culture, I'm sure.
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Lots of um just talking heads and maybe quite academic and quite dull theaters.
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They were trying to shake it up, they were trying to kick out the arse, they were like, let's do something crazy with it, let's queerify it, let's change the genders, all this, all this kind of stuff that we see.
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But I think what they the mistake they made was, and I fell into this as well, was believing that that culture would just stay there, it would the culture would be sufficiently served by just being in a library.
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Like it has to be a living thing.
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That's what we've always kind of thought, that's why we've always been actually doing things and trying to be in action all the time.
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Because unless you actually live it, I think it will just disappear.
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And I think we have found that over the last couple of generations, because we haven't been cultivating it and preserving it and being engaged with it, it has started to disappear.
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Um, and that's just gonna that's just gonna accelerate.
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Because there's things in like take Hamlet for example, there's things that you actually can't get from just reading it in the book.
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There's things that you only get from the like there's uh a professor called Neville Coghill talks about Shakespeare's visual meaning.
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There's certain meanings that you only receive from the arrangement of space and bodies that Shakespeare has like encoded into the text, and you're not gonna get that unless it's living and lively.
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So there's going to be a severing point if if that happens.
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Um but yes.
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Culture in general, that it isn't something that is frozen in amber, and so in some respects, you can actually have sympathy for those people who are trying to meld it through their own cultural reality of how it is that they live their lives.
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So, in some ways, I can be quite sympathetic to the idea of um applying a new lens on it.
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However, I suppose um let's let's unpack a pretty common argument here.
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So the progressive argument is someone like Shakespeare belongs to everyone.
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Classics are universal, let's make them accessible, and so diverse casting, contemporary settings, and that ideological reinterpretation we're talking about.
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And then I suppose what we've just been talking about is sometimes the the interpretation of some conservatives that believe Shakespeare belongs to a specific tradition should be performed with fidelity to that tradition, but it's kind of set and fixed.
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But I think you two have a third position, which is anyone can do Shakespeare, but he has to be met on his terms.
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Um the taxi authority, it's not the director's politics.
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So, one is that right, um, and what do you know, what do you notice when you put Shakespeare or any of those classics in a room full of people without any of that ideological apparatus?
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Yeah, it's a tri it's it's tricky, isn't it?
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Because we we are fighting against these sort of different instincts of conservation and kind of futurism or something like that, you know, trying to work out how the old can become new.
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And so we don't want to become too stuffy and antiquated in our sort of love of the Western canon.
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It has to be there has to be something vital and new fizzing out of it.
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I think that's a nice phrase you use there, John, about uh meeting him on his terms.
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His terms are complicated and they're not straightforward, but there is something about at least aiming towards something like that when you're when you're approaching the text.
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It's like, where where is this character?
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You know, like what are they talking about?
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What can we what can we take from this um from this feature or this scene or this play?
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What can we understand?
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And yeah, like trying not to put like an ideological lens on that, not trying not to see the character through like a feminist lens or a kind of post colonial lens or something, which is very likely what you would have been studying probably uh from the 80s onwards.
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Uh I I I think I think Shakespeare is very difficult and it reveals how stupid many of us become.
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I think syntactically you can see that.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:07.519
You can you you when you read it, it's incredibly complicated uh to understand uh unless you're extraordinarily intelligent.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:15.440
And and I I find that fascinating because it suggests to me that Shakespeare was probably writing for people he assumed would understand this.
00:22:15.680 --> 00:22:17.599
So that's interesting to think of, isn't it?
00:22:17.680 --> 00:22:24.000
That we we maybe have kind of uh fallen, basically, in in our understanding of syntax and language.
00:22:24.240 --> 00:22:37.200
I I I I I just love bringing uh Shakespeare uh to everyone, and that's that's that sounds quite sort of uh kind of uh woke or stuff, but I'm not fully against all these ideas uh, you know, on the on the left.
00:22:37.279 --> 00:22:42.720
There's some ideas that I'm like, yeah, you don't want this to be just some elitist thing that only posh people can access.
00:22:42.880 --> 00:22:44.240
That's that's not right, you know.
00:22:44.480 --> 00:22:56.240
And uh I I think if you bring Shakespeare in a room and you meet and you just study it with people and you try and understand it and you work on it with students, uh you'd be surprised how quickly it can come to life.
00:22:56.319 --> 00:22:58.640
It can take a few weeks, but it is accessible actually.
00:22:58.720 --> 00:23:05.920
It just takes a kind of a bit of hard work, uh, uh understanding the rhythms, understand the thoughts, understand the character situation.
00:23:06.079 --> 00:23:12.319
Oli's got a lovely theory on this called Stirs, which perhaps you can explain a bit, Ollie, in a second.
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:21.920
Um, but it's yeah, it's great to bring, I think, I think actually you can bring it, it's not necessarily Elite Shakespeare, but it is very complicated and it demands a lot of people.
00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:26.960
And you you you know, don't waste your time with all these stupid lenses.
00:23:27.039 --> 00:23:32.559
Like there's enough, there's enough challenges in there than than kind of worrying about where you're framing this for now.
00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:35.440
We we we really the problem is really not that at the moment.
00:23:35.599 --> 00:23:41.279
The problem is that we just need to bring this back to life in its purity, in its situation.
00:23:41.519 --> 00:23:45.680
And and I think we're I'm interested in doing that as a teacher, and I think Ollie is too.
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:47.519
Well, that's what we tried to do.
00:23:47.920 --> 00:23:52.640
Yeah, brilliant phrase, John, but then we could uh I could put it uh meeting Shakespeare on on his own terms.
00:23:52.799 --> 00:24:03.599
Um that's what we tried to do with the Project 39, which people might have seen the Shakespeare project, where we filmed the speech from every every play, and we've put it online, we've put on YouTube, you have some great actors.
00:24:03.839 --> 00:24:09.440
And the idea was to to try and strip it of any ideological framing.
00:24:09.680 --> 00:24:13.839
Um, because yeah, I agree with what with what Morgan just said.
00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:15.680
We're we're not even ready for that yet.
00:24:15.759 --> 00:24:18.000
We actually have to just know the stuff.
00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:23.200
We've had a couple of generations, as I was saying, of deconstruction, that there's nothing left to deconstruct anymore.
00:24:23.359 --> 00:24:27.359
Yeah, we have to just rebuild some basic knowledge of the thing.
00:24:27.680 --> 00:24:31.599
So that's the first that's the first step, that's the first port of call.
00:24:31.839 --> 00:24:41.920
Um uh, but I think there's yeah, there's something of there is a lot of power in Shakespeare's language, and that's what we tried to bring to the fore with Project 39.
00:24:42.240 --> 00:24:50.960
When the actors really embody it, um it has a vitality and it has a a weight and and heat of thinking.
00:24:51.119 --> 00:25:08.400
Like sometimes as Morgan was saying, Shakespeare's syntax gets so complicated, actually, because it's just under the pressure of such emotional and intellectual intensity that it's almost like the language begins to warp because and theatre is a very pressurized form, it's quite a short form as as art forms go.
00:25:08.480 --> 00:25:13.599
So the language starts to kind of warp under this this this emotional heat, which is which is amazing.
00:25:13.839 --> 00:25:30.640
But your question is is the million-dollar question in a way, like how do we conserve culture without being silly, as most people would understand it, but how do we not make it stuffy and just the purview of a few uh Tory boys and girls?
00:25:30.799 --> 00:25:35.119
Um how do we make it uh sort of accessible?
00:25:35.359 --> 00:25:38.640
Okay, so I saw a Shakespeare show a a few weeks ago.
00:25:38.799 --> 00:25:41.119
Well, I won't say where it wasn't very good, right?
00:25:41.440 --> 00:25:46.079
And it wasn't very good because it was totally patronizing to the audience.
00:25:46.319 --> 00:26:00.640
If anyone's been to see a Shakespeare show, I guarantee they would have seen some kind of actor doing some kind of hip gyration on any vaguely sexual line, which that should be banned, um because it's just very, very cheap.
00:26:00.799 --> 00:26:05.680
And uh they're sort of saying to the audience, you don't get this, but it's okay.
00:26:06.079 --> 00:26:15.839
We can make it slightly silly and it always kind of camp, backing away from the vitality, from the power of it, backing away from the difficulty of it, backing away from the weirdness of it.
00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:20.240
Shakespeare's really weird, always sort of cosmically weird stuff going on in the tragedies.
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:43.200
I was sitting there in the audience thinking, I genuinely think if they'd have done, it was as you like it, if they'd have done this kind of seriously, I'm taking it seriously, actually lent into its power and its complexity, people would meet it, or or they would have some kind of experience rather than this fake kind of non-experience where they think they've kind of got it, but they but they basically haven't.
00:26:43.359 --> 00:26:51.599
Um, so it's some way of doing Shakespeare like that, where we don't dumb him down, but of course we can do things.
00:26:51.759 --> 00:26:57.440
I mean, the ideal situation would be for people to vote with their feet, I think, kind of surely.
00:26:57.599 --> 00:27:08.160
You can you can do your lesbian hello against the backdrop of climate change, but we can also do a really vital, weird, powerful Julius Caesar, and people can see what they prefer.
00:27:08.400 --> 00:27:16.799
At the moment, the funding apparatus is set up that one gets all the money and we get no money, so it's it's that that needs to kind of change.
00:27:16.960 --> 00:27:24.799
And and I I I obviously we believe that people would prefer what we do, but you know, we we have to see.
00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:57.039
Your point about theatre or cultural artifacts not being just for for posh Tory boys and posh people in general is is actually a vital one because I do have just a general concern, and it's something that I felt very much going through my schooling, was there is a disdain in the country for uh intellectualism of any sort, but also uh culture like this in some way.
00:27:57.200 --> 00:27:59.599
Um, and the disdain comes from both ways.
00:27:59.680 --> 00:28:09.920
There's kind of a top-down disdain to those people who might not get it because they're not educated, and then there's the kind of bottom-up disdain, insofar as you can be like, oh, well, that's just a bit silly, what's the point?
00:28:10.160 --> 00:28:24.000
But what's really annoying is that at some point in the last couple of hundred years, there actually was a very vital organic culture amongst people of the working classes, which I talked about to death on this podcast at this point.
00:28:24.160 --> 00:28:44.799
You know, there was a deep intellectual life, people who did read the classics on their own terms, who did come up with their own institutions that were self-funded through small contributions where they met and they read things together and they learned to debate and they learned to act and they learned to sing and they did all of these things, and then they go to these theatre productions which were put down in mining villages and all the rest of it, and nothing was dumbed down.
00:28:44.960 --> 00:28:56.319
And what they recognized in that was human dignity, they rec rec recognized the the um the excellence that can be contained within literature and being able to raise themselves up to that excellence.
00:28:56.559 --> 00:29:20.799
And the point you make about gyrating hips and campified plays, just to get a bit of a cheap laugh, because it can't be bothered to explain things, or or or they they think people are going to be uncomfortable in sitting with something that isn't just put on a plate for them, and so they just make a mockery of it, is it's just another way of having a tyranny of low expectations.
00:29:21.279 --> 00:29:40.640
And I I I, for one, am someone who's all for, you know, use use the flowery language, you go for the depth, even if even if the modern world is totally diracinated and just devoid of depth at this point and people's brains aren't switched on, is I do think people are like moths to the flame.
00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:48.319
If there's that little bit of weirdness or something which feels poignant, if they're captured in that moment, it's gonna lead them on to go and explore.
00:29:48.480 --> 00:29:59.920
But if everyone just says, well, you're not gonna get it, we'll just gyrate our hips, or or we're just gonna dumb down this plot line in this show and you're gonna repeat it four times in a half an hour episode because you've got bad attention spans.
00:30:00.079 --> 00:30:05.839
We've got literally no hope at all of raising ourselves up beyond where we're we currently are.
00:30:06.240 --> 00:30:06.960
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:07.039 --> 00:30:12.160
I John, I couldn't have said it uh better, so I I may just be echoing what you said.
00:30:12.240 --> 00:30:18.640
But you I I might I look at uh pictures from my dad's village uh in Abertradur, where he grew up in near Kofilly.
00:30:18.720 --> 00:30:25.839
I grew up in London, but my dad was Welsh, and uh there's a working men's club there, a huge, wonderful old Victorian building that's completely abandoned now.
00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:27.759
And there was a library in there.
00:30:28.000 --> 00:30:34.400
And and you just the idea of like a working men's club with a huge library is kind of a wonderful idea, right?
00:30:34.559 --> 00:30:40.000
And we we we struggle with this these problems of can you uplift the masses?
00:30:40.160 --> 00:30:51.839
You know, that's kind of like if we if we if we work really hard with culture, can you suddenly get all the scaffolders and you know the roofers uh discussing whether Hamlet's to be or not to be speech or whatever it would be?
00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:53.759
Um maybe not, right?
00:30:53.839 --> 00:30:57.200
And and maybe maybe that is a little bit of a delusion.
00:30:57.279 --> 00:31:16.400
And you see this even with Stanislavski when uh Konstantin Sanoslavsky, the kind of great acting theorist and director and uh actor and teacher, in where the revolution is happening in Russia, he's kind of taken in and he he believes it at the beginning, and he wants to one of his big things is he wants to get this great art out to the masses, right?
00:31:16.640 --> 00:31:34.960
Uh so this is a great desire we have, and it it's it is hard to achieve, and and we there is a sort of potential kind of maybe like slightly nihilistic conclusion where you go, actually, they just want to watch Love Island, really, we can run around trying to do this, but they just they're just gonna watch Love Island or just scroll through TikTok.
00:31:35.119 --> 00:31:43.359
Uh, and and a lot of people will probably do that, but I think our job as people who believe in this culture and believe in this is to fight against something there.
00:31:43.440 --> 00:31:49.119
And as you say, we might be able to do small bits and kind of have some effect in somewhere.
00:31:49.279 --> 00:31:52.799
And I am interested in reminding the people of who they are.
00:31:53.119 --> 00:32:10.640
That's that's kind of the thing I think is really important about the livingness of the Western text, is to say this is who you are, that this is the fabric of your being, and these characters are these stories, and we need to bring that to the world to remind people of who they are, to to raise morale.
00:32:10.720 --> 00:32:18.799
Because yeah, we do live in this kind of, as you said, deratinated, sort of depressed, deflated, confusing time and AI rising and all sorts of stuff.
00:32:18.880 --> 00:32:21.599
And uh what how what what do we do?
00:32:21.759 --> 00:32:23.200
How how do we deal with that?
00:32:23.279 --> 00:32:34.000
And and and perhaps all we can all we can do is fight to carry something through into maybe something that can come in the future, even if it feels hopeless at times.
00:32:34.319 --> 00:32:42.640
Uh a friend a f an artist friend of ours always talked about us as it's quite a sad, depressing image, but there's a there's a um there's uh Ollie, what was it?
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:43.039
The Roman.
00:32:44.960 --> 00:32:45.680
It's Pompey, yeah.
00:32:45.759 --> 00:32:47.680
There's the sta there's the kind of Pompeii.
00:32:47.839 --> 00:32:57.440
Pompeii, yeah, there's the the Roman uh the statue or the kind of remains of a man who was like holding back the even though the the the the ashes were coming towards him or the the lava.
00:32:57.680 --> 00:32:58.640
I don't know what's the exact story.
00:32:59.519 --> 00:33:02.000
It was like a soldier who he didn't leave his post.
00:33:02.160 --> 00:33:04.480
The lava was coming, but he was there.
00:33:04.640 --> 00:33:07.839
So yeah, and you know, probably you you want to be that guy.
00:33:08.559 --> 00:33:09.200
Yeah, yeah.
00:33:09.279 --> 00:33:16.960
So I it that's a very kind of very tragic idea, but I think it's it's probably a kind of profound tragic idea to at least you might as well strive for that.
00:33:17.200 --> 00:33:20.160
At your very least, you'll be standing there in the ashes, you know what I mean.
00:33:20.480 --> 00:33:22.240
Um something like that.
00:33:22.400 --> 00:33:28.480
So I think we need to fight for it for a number of l uh uh reasons, but it yeah, it is it's it is gonna be hard.
00:33:28.559 --> 00:33:36.960
I think it's slightly naive to think that like suddenly we're gonna have everyone you know reading Pinder or you know uh Herodotus and th discussing Thucydides.
00:33:37.200 --> 00:33:39.440
Uh but we should we should we should fight for it.
00:33:39.680 --> 00:33:42.960
I'm st I'm cautiously optimistic actually.
00:33:43.920 --> 00:33:45.119
For a cultural renaissance.
00:33:45.440 --> 00:33:46.559
Quite off-brand for me.
00:33:46.799 --> 00:34:01.519
Well, I think the the thing we have on our side, uh obviously I know it's very difficult, but I think the the opening that there is, or the thing we have on our side, is that the current cultural elites have have completely reneged on their duty in that regard.
00:34:01.759 --> 00:34:10.960
Like they um, you know, there's there's nothing more middle class than woke, even though it talks about being the language of the oppressed and and all of this kind of stuff.
00:34:11.119 --> 00:34:18.000
It um it it completely disregards, is is actively hostile to working class, right?
00:34:18.320 --> 00:34:21.199
So for me that suggests that there is an opening.
00:34:21.360 --> 00:34:30.079
As you say, Morgan people are open to enchantment and being reminded of who they are, and it feels like there's a gap that they're being completely unserved.
00:34:30.159 --> 00:34:38.400
We've seen that gap be filled in other areas, like all of the podcasts, intellectually serving people who are otherwise not served by like the BBC or whatever.
00:34:38.559 --> 00:34:47.199
We've seen it with uh yeah, with news like GB News is a kind of kind of working class um outfit, I suppose, in so it's to give expression to that.
00:34:47.440 --> 00:34:56.639
Um and yeah, there's a part of what we do that does want to give expression to that, particularly in the new writing, we're kind of interested in.
00:34:57.199 --> 00:35:12.719
But yeah, I mean, every the royal court says, and everyone says they're interested in like working class voices and all that stuff, but we would actually be genuinely open to the views that they that they might have that would be susceptible to the royal court despite what they say.
00:35:13.039 --> 00:35:16.400
So we're we're we're actually very, very, very open to that.
00:35:16.559 --> 00:35:25.760
And I think I think something could happen in that area, and obviously we're gonna be fighting against C AI and a lot of other stuff, so it won't be easy, but there is an opening.
00:35:26.400 --> 00:35:27.760
They they don't care, of course.
00:35:27.840 --> 00:35:30.719
We know this, us three, but they don't care about working class voices.
00:35:30.800 --> 00:35:35.039
They haven't listened to working class voices on migration, for instance, for the last 30 years.
00:35:35.199 --> 00:35:37.360
That's just kind of sort of pushed to the side.
00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:38.079
They can't.
00:35:38.159 --> 00:35:46.320
I I grew up, lots of my friends were working class growing up, you know, and uh my my mates were and and their views were always very different to mine.
00:35:46.559 --> 00:35:55.119
I was I was kind of the lovey lefty when I was younger, and and and actually like they would just be quite instinctive about their opinions and they would talk and they were very open.
00:35:55.199 --> 00:36:04.000
This is the thing I always found interesting about them was that I could have discussions with them, uh, and and they were very respectful to the fact that I disagreed with them.
00:36:04.159 --> 00:36:15.360
And I found myself in the arts that when I began to turn around to some people in the arts and say, Well, I'm not quite sure about this, they would the way you that you'd be treated by from the left was terrible, right?
00:36:15.440 --> 00:36:18.320
And it was and it was increasing, and then that just increases, doesn't it?
00:36:18.400 --> 00:36:24.480
When people kind of leave the left, they have that experience where you kind of start to question things and you're told you're not allowed to do that.
00:36:24.719 --> 00:36:28.159
Uh so yes, in in and so on and so forth.
00:36:28.239 --> 00:36:38.559
And uh just my sort of general point being is that there's there's absolutely no connection and understanding of the working class by the the royal court or any of these places at all.
00:36:38.719 --> 00:37:01.119
And any of these writers that claim that they care about the working class, they don't because they've they've spent the whole the last 30 years uh completely allowing these people to be trashed and to be called racists and be called to be called gamons, you know, to be or they've just they've allowed this, they've facilitated this, and then they have the nerve, they have the nerve to say they're they're left wing and they care about the working class.
00:37:01.199 --> 00:37:02.880
It's it's utter bullshit.
00:37:03.039 --> 00:37:18.639
They they are it's it's utter nonsense, they are liars and they are cowards, and we have to call them out, and and I know who they are in my head, I know lots of them are, and uh, and um and we know we should say we're not just talking Abstella, like these are people we know and have worked with, right?
00:37:18.880 --> 00:37:20.400
They're set yeah, they're complete sellouts.
00:37:20.480 --> 00:37:31.440
They don't, they don't, they're not, you know, and and and I'm not saying that I'm some kind of you know, you know, walk your Jesus working or walking around the working class, and you know, uh I I'm just an I'm but I'm I'm honest.
00:37:31.519 --> 00:37:38.000
I try to be honest and say like what what I see and what I understand, and and and that that this is there's no there's none of that.
00:37:38.079 --> 00:37:50.320
And if you don't have that, you don't have freedom, you don't have you we didn't have one pro-Brexit play, one pro-Brexit uh piece of TV or film uh in in a country that voted 52% in its favour.
00:37:50.480 --> 00:37:56.079
And that that just shows like a complete like lack of plurality at very least in in the arts, right?
00:37:56.239 --> 00:38:01.760
Just a lack of a willingness to explore why 52% of people have voted for this.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:03.519
And that was yeah, go on.
00:38:03.760 --> 00:38:05.119
No, I'd say we go back even further.
00:38:05.280 --> 00:38:11.519
I mean, is there any positive portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, one of the most popular prime ministers in the 20th century?
00:38:11.840 --> 00:38:17.760
No, and all my friends, when I was lots of my friends were like working-class Thatcherites, they like Thatcher.
00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:26.559
And I thought I could tell them you can't like Thatcher, you know, because I've just been indoctrinated with the you know, arrogant leftyism that was kind of what you get given, right?
00:38:26.639 --> 00:38:35.280
And not and and and by the way, I'm sure there are some you know critiques of Thatcher, and I don't think me and Ollie would say necessarily like Thatcher's amazing or not.
00:38:35.360 --> 00:38:36.719
We know we we are we are just opening up.
00:38:36.880 --> 00:38:38.559
This is covering my Thatcher post term.
00:38:39.280 --> 00:38:40.320
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:38:40.400 --> 00:38:42.239
We're just we we you know you get it, right?
00:38:42.400 --> 00:38:44.719
We need to have this plurality of exploration.
00:38:44.880 --> 00:38:49.840
Uh I had another point on the Western Canon, but uh shall I come back to it, John, in a bit?
00:38:50.320 --> 00:38:53.440
You can you can carry on with the the Western canon, Morgan.
00:38:54.000 --> 00:39:12.960
Okay, so I I was just gonna kind of add to Ollie's point about the Western canon before the kind of working class um passionate segue, and say that the the the yes, in amongst all the ruin we're experien we're all feeling and seeing, the there is this there is the Western canon and it's extraordinary.
00:39:13.119 --> 00:39:22.559
Uh and it is it's the great thing we have on our side is that in there's other things, but in terms of the arts and culture, it's it's untouchable.
00:39:22.719 --> 00:39:24.320
Nothing compares to it.
00:39:24.480 --> 00:39:29.679
There is nothing in the world that it comes anywhere close to how brilliant this thing is, right?
00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:52.800
All the all the way back to like uh to Homer, to Plato, to Aristotle, to Euripides, to Aeschylus, to the Romans, so on and to the medieval, to the so on and so forth, the Elizabethans, the Voltaire, the French, uh the Russians, you know, all of this stuff, this history that we we all kind of come from and our ancestors have been saturated in, is still there.
00:39:53.199 --> 00:39:54.320
It's all there.
00:39:54.880 --> 00:40:00.000
And they have nothing, they have nothing in comparison to that.
00:40:00.320 --> 00:40:08.400
And so I I think that's something to take kind of uh great hope in, but we have to fight for it and we have to go into it really.
00:40:08.480 --> 00:40:18.960
But it's it what I'm sort of saying is we basically have behind us unbelievable ammunition, like unbelievable stocks, and so we have a lot to fight with.
00:40:21.519 --> 00:40:26.719
Question on the Western canon, I've posed this to people before, but can it be added to?
00:40:26.960 --> 00:40:50.800
And I'll give a quick addendum to that question because the Western canon, as you've just shown through your description from the ancient Greeks all the way down to the present day, was in a living tension between ancient Greek philosophy and the value structure there, plus intention with Jerusalem Christian ideals.
00:40:51.760 --> 00:40:55.280
They wrapped up through absolutely everything.
00:40:55.360 --> 00:41:21.440
The amount of references to psalms and proverbs and gospel passages to virtue ethics to the Stoics, to you know the the list goes on that people just got because it was within their literary diet, and as we've discussed, even amongst the working classes in in Victorian England, um there has clearly been a severing of that thread.
00:41:21.679 --> 00:41:44.000
And so, without that tension between the the Christian gods and Platonic ideals and all the rest of it, given that most people are just set themselves counter to that, even if you're to create art that was in the West, from the West, and might be considered good, and I don't know if there are any examples of that, but who knows, maybe there is.
00:41:44.320 --> 00:41:50.480
Could it still be part of the Western canon if it doesn't even reference any of those things from the last 3,000 years or so?
00:41:50.639 --> 00:41:57.920
Do you think the Western canon, unless it is done within that tradition and speaks to those things, um, can be added to?
00:41:59.280 --> 00:42:01.519
Very, very good question.
00:42:01.760 --> 00:42:04.639
Very very hard question, as you know.
00:42:04.960 --> 00:42:13.280
Um well, I think the first thing to acknowledge is as as you're saying, the Western canon is not necessarily cohesive.
00:42:13.440 --> 00:42:15.760
I mean it's a very internally contradictory thing.
00:42:16.079 --> 00:42:39.840
If we just talk about drama, the Western canon would be ancient Greek drama and comedy, Roman tragedy and comedy, early modern Elizabethan, Golden Age in Spain, realism revolution of um Norway and Sweden and um Russia, and then maybe post-war um working class theatre.
00:42:39.920 --> 00:42:46.480
Those would be the sort of big, big highlights, and there's so many different uh uh ideas and ideologies in there.
00:42:46.639 --> 00:42:57.199
You could even say that the split between pagan and Christian within the Western canon is bigger than anything else that we could possibly experience.
00:42:57.440 --> 00:43:09.599
So I think it's an important starting place to acknowledge that it is an internally potentially an internally contradictory, or at least at the very least, an internally argumentative canon.
00:43:09.840 --> 00:43:18.960
So conflict and agon is sort of built into it, and I think that is that's a good starting point.
00:43:19.519 --> 00:43:22.000
Obviously, I would like it to be added to.
00:43:22.079 --> 00:43:30.960
I'd like to there to be a cultural renaissance in the UK in 2026, I would like tragedies to be written, great comedies.
00:43:31.360 --> 00:43:51.039
Um I think there's a way of doing that in dialogue with the Western canon that is not just kind of cosplaying, imitating it, um, that that is actually a true reflection of where of where we are, but uses its forms.
00:43:51.199 --> 00:43:55.119
I mean, Shakespeare uses the ancient Greek tragic form.
00:43:55.199 --> 00:43:59.760
It's debated how much knowledge he had of it, might have knowledge of it through through the Romans, most likely.
00:44:00.079 --> 00:44:01.920
Likely because he didn't really have much Greek.
00:44:02.559 --> 00:44:06.559
But he does reinvent tragedy whilst remaining true to it, I would say.
00:44:06.800 --> 00:44:14.559
And so perhaps we can use that as an example of how the Wokanon can be added to without being totally severed.
00:44:15.599 --> 00:44:18.639
Separate question whether we are too severed to even do that.
00:44:18.800 --> 00:44:19.599
I don't I don't know.
00:44:19.679 --> 00:44:21.920
I I hope not, and I and I don't think so.
00:44:22.079 --> 00:44:25.519
But yeah, that that would be my attempt at an answer with that.
00:44:25.840 --> 00:44:26.480
Morgan?
00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:36.400
Yes, I think those people who are doing what you're saying, they actually have severed themselves from this and good riddance.
00:44:36.559 --> 00:44:40.639
You know, like let them let them let them float off into oblivion, they're useless.
00:44:42.159 --> 00:44:43.760
They've done that, they've made that choice.
00:44:43.920 --> 00:44:55.039
I mean, you could maybe say that they're saturated by language, and we are all un you know, fortunately or unfortunately saturated by uh Christianity and kind of morality.
00:44:55.119 --> 00:45:03.920
We're we're confused creatures who are kind of working with with this kind of framework we'd we've inherited as we come into the world and we learn language and stuff.
00:45:04.000 --> 00:45:08.239
So in some ways, it's you know, you can't fully sever yourself from this world, right?
00:45:08.320 --> 00:45:12.880
But I think they've made a pretty active choice to say we don't want this.
00:45:13.039 --> 00:45:15.199
They've weirdly tried to co-opt Shakespeare.
00:45:15.280 --> 00:45:32.480
That's the kind of and they do it with the Greeks a little bit because they think they can't classics are cool, or like we're gonna, you know, and actually uh one of the reasons the classics are quite cool is because there are brilliant female characters in in in Greek plays, uh uh play after play is like the incredible characters, same as in Shakespeare.
00:45:32.559 --> 00:45:52.000
So so it they almost can't avoid this stuff, but yes, I think they've severed them they they they have, and yeah, but we uh we need to reattach ourselves to it, and I think that's part of the project that me and Ollie are doing is saying, look, we need to we need to get right into this, we need to be connected with it, and it is like is the Bible is the big one I forgot to mention before.
00:45:52.079 --> 00:45:55.119
It's it's that is that is the spine of it all, I think.
00:45:55.199 --> 00:45:57.280
Really, uh it runs through everything, you know.
00:45:57.360 --> 00:46:20.880
You see, you're gonna see like you'll see Byron uh writes this play, Kane, then uh uh Goethe writes Faust, and um uh Y Dostoevsky is slightly different, but they're they're all of these different writers are kind of wrestling with this kind of central scriptural education that is that is permeated throughout the kind of Western hemisphere.
00:46:20.960 --> 00:46:28.400
So it is unavoidable that we're connected to to this book, and therefore we are in some ways connected around these these these narratives.
00:46:28.800 --> 00:46:37.840
I uh yes, so uh I had another point, but I actually can't remember what what what that what that was.
00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:39.840
But uh we need to add this was it.
00:46:39.920 --> 00:46:41.039
We need to reconnect with this.
00:46:41.199 --> 00:46:49.519
I think when you look at the revolutionaries in Russia in the in the sort of 1910, sorry, and you you have like Mayakovsky and Mayerhold.
00:46:51.599 --> 00:46:53.360
They know what they're rebelling against.
00:46:53.519 --> 00:46:55.840
They are they've read all this stuff, you know.
00:46:55.920 --> 00:47:05.760
Uh uh Mayakovsky, there's a character called Vladimir Myakovsky, we did a play by him, a very interesting, kind of slightly mad, huge poet, playwright, revolutionary.
00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:18.880
He was always quoting uh Don Quixote, you know, Cervantes, the novel, and the the the the these revolution these kind of characters that they had so much in them, to they were rebelling against a lot, and you know, you can agree with that or not.
00:47:19.039 --> 00:47:24.480
Whereas today's rebels, they know nothing of the past, they they they have no connection to it at all.
00:47:24.639 --> 00:47:36.639
They're they're just idiots who are just kind of you know talking about capitalism being bad or the patriarchy or some some crap like that, you know, and and and they don't even know what those ideas are formulated of.
00:47:36.719 --> 00:47:40.400
They they couldn't even really explain to you capitalism or communism.
00:47:40.639 --> 00:47:52.800
So they're just it's just it's vacuous, rebellious, uh, uneducated, weak behavior by people we shouldn't take seriously and give any power to and give any money to.
00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:58.400
Yeah, it's like they're um they're just dropping airstrikes on the rubble.
00:47:58.480 --> 00:48:00.480
They don't even know what it is they're destroying anymore.
00:48:00.639 --> 00:48:02.159
For them, it's already destroyed.
00:48:02.320 --> 00:48:14.559
Uh they don't the image though that we uh used to talk about was an image of modern culture is someone sticking their middle finger up at uh the ruins of a church where there's no there's no one there anymore.
00:48:14.719 --> 00:48:18.239
And then so it becomes a totally empty, meaningless gesture.
00:48:18.639 --> 00:48:20.000
Yeah, absolutely.
00:48:20.159 --> 00:48:35.679
Uh I I know we've dunked a lot on uh progressives today, and I think we've I think I think we've uh uh but but but I think we've also pointed towards the perils of the conservative mindset and their approach to culture.
00:48:35.760 --> 00:48:45.119
So someone I'm sure we're all familiar with, Lola Salem, writes very well on this, where she she argues that the right can't produce culture because it doesn't really understand what it is.
00:48:45.440 --> 00:49:08.800
And people in the right today might use um culture as propaganda for the conservative values, the same reason why progressives do it rather than what it was always meant for, which was the pursuit of beauty, truth, goodness for their own sake, and so that's a uh that's let's do uh one question.
00:49:08.960 --> 00:49:13.760
We'll do two questions on the base, uh, and then we'll we'll go into the question I ask all my guests.
00:49:13.840 --> 00:49:17.599
But first question is what does that mean for the base?
00:49:17.760 --> 00:49:26.960
Would you say you're a conservative cultural project, or would you say that you're an artistic project that's incompatible with the progressive consensus, or is there something else?
00:49:27.679 --> 00:49:42.960
Uh yeah, I I I I'm gonna sidestep that because even to label as one of those two, or you've given us nice, two juicy alternatives, but I'm gonna reject both of them as being too limiting potentially, right?
00:49:43.199 --> 00:49:48.960
I mean I agree with you and agree with Lola that there is a great danger that we just sort of do the propaganda back.
00:49:49.519 --> 00:50:00.639
Um again, it's a very, very big, very, very difficult question, but um I think there is I think we need to eliminate the utilitarian attitude to culture.
00:50:01.039 --> 00:50:15.039
Yes, you can say there's always an intention with a piece of art, um as as our mutual friend Pierre said in conversation with me the other day, you know, even a a a love song has a has a definite outcome that it wants to achieve, right?
00:50:15.519 --> 00:50:27.039
Um but there is something damaging and very limiting about the utilitarian approach to culture, and therefore we should actually think of culture as a more spiritual thing.
00:50:27.760 --> 00:50:37.679
And once we've forgotten about usefulness, which is such an ugly, even it's an ugly word, it's an ugly approach to have to an artifact.
00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:46.880
If we abandon that, we might be able to give culture the dignity of give culture a kind of spiritual dignity, I think.
00:50:47.280 --> 00:50:53.679
But what do you would you agree with either one of those alternatives that John gave us, Morgan?
00:50:54.480 --> 00:50:55.199
Uh maybe not.
00:50:55.360 --> 00:50:58.480
Yeah, it's hard to kind of fall into either camp, really, exactly.
00:50:58.559 --> 00:51:03.360
I think I th I I I just believe in plural I uh uh what do I believe in?
00:51:04.880 --> 00:51:23.679
I I believe in free exploration of freedom of thought in in inquiry artistically and freedom of expression, the the ability to be able to put stuff on stage or to put stuff on screen that challenges us and gets us to s to really think about what's going on.
00:51:23.840 --> 00:51:34.400
You know, because we ha we know that we live in these kind of febrile, divided, mad times, and there's so much going on, and there's so little reflection of that on film and TV, in my in my opinion.
00:51:34.559 --> 00:51:42.719
You might get the odd kind of left sort of lefty skewed film, like what was the one, the Paul Thomas Anderson one, the uh One Battle after another.
00:51:42.960 --> 00:51:44.320
Yeah, you might get something like that.
00:51:44.400 --> 00:51:49.679
But I I I guess what I'm saying is that I don't actually want I I don't care if it's I don't even care if something's awoke, that's fine.
00:51:49.760 --> 00:51:51.039
I just want openness.
00:51:51.199 --> 00:51:55.199
I want the we are let's explore what's really going on with different groups.
00:51:55.360 --> 00:51:59.519
Let's not pretend that like every person who's Pakistani is is good.
00:51:59.679 --> 00:52:13.119
You know, why don't we explore like racism in the what uh in other in inter-ethnic racism or any just the perversity of everything because the world is perverse and strange and weird, and I think art should be allowed to explore that.
00:52:13.280 --> 00:52:18.400
And then it moving into sort of other uh areas uh with like Lola's kind of ideas.
00:52:18.480 --> 00:52:24.159
Yes, I also believe we should explore, we should pursue uh beauty and kind of goodness.
00:52:24.239 --> 00:52:37.760
If we can if we can balance these things, I think we're in a very interesting place, and I think we should strive for excellence uh in in in craft, and so I I I I suppose we need to with the base, I just think we need to fuse all of these things together.
00:52:37.840 --> 00:52:50.800
Is like we study the past, we we learn from the past and we we explore it honestly, and we create new art for the future, new stories for the future, and we do these all of these different things at the same time, I suppose.
00:52:50.880 --> 00:52:55.360
So it wouldn't it's hard to sort sort of put us into an exact category there.
00:52:55.440 --> 00:53:01.119
I think we probably need to be striving to create some sort of new world, yeah.
00:53:01.440 --> 00:53:02.320
Culturally.
00:53:02.719 --> 00:53:04.719
And time is kind of running out.
00:53:04.880 --> 00:53:05.920
Sorry to put in there, John.
00:53:06.159 --> 00:53:06.639
No, go for it.
00:53:06.800 --> 00:53:17.039
Um, in terms of the standards and acting standards, as you said right at the beginning, we used to be renowned through the world for and you you watch like a Harry Potter or something like that, and you're oh this is good.
00:53:17.199 --> 00:53:22.719
I've never seen Harry Potter, but this is good because you've got all of the, you know, your gamber and Rickman and all of that stuff.
00:53:22.960 --> 00:53:32.239
Um I can see from my experience of teaching and being in rehearsal rooms and seeing things, I the standards are they really are dropping.
00:53:32.639 --> 00:53:37.119
And so we really, really need to to get them back.
00:53:37.360 --> 00:53:44.719
And part of that, a huge part of that is getting back in touch with with this canon that is uh just at our fingertips.
00:53:44.800 --> 00:53:48.480
Um, otherwise there will not be those those actors anymore.
00:53:48.639 --> 00:53:54.239
Um, and we will have lost a key element of of the truth and the beauty because it's contained in that skill.
00:53:54.639 --> 00:54:03.840
Well, I'm very glad you're both trying to wrest um the the the canon back from the the grubby claws of those who currently have the hands on it.
00:54:03.920 --> 00:54:09.599
And the reason why I say that is as you were speaking there, it brought to mind something that happened recently.
00:54:09.760 --> 00:54:35.599
I was waiting to be uh interviewed, and so I was sitting in a cafe, I think it was um uh the was at the Sinfonia in Smith Square, um near near the banks of the Thames in London, and I um was sitting in a part of the cafe which uh uh was near the doors that came from the stage where I think rehearsals had been on, and I was suddenly surrounded by a bunch of people who had just been on the stage.
00:54:35.920 --> 00:54:39.519
And the conversation was a real eye-opener.
00:54:39.760 --> 00:54:48.880
Well, it wasn't an eye-opener, it was a perfect example of the kind of mental life that people have going on, the the the state of the internal life.
00:54:49.039 --> 00:55:00.639
I heard them refer to um sneaking in things like up the ra in uh various uh stage plays, so uh a good old promo for the IRA.
00:55:00.719 --> 00:55:13.039
Uh talks talks about them stuck it stuffing coke up their noses, um, some of them just hanging around in their bedrooms all weekends, then talking about general sexual debauchery.
00:55:13.280 --> 00:55:23.039
And these are the people who are literally in a building which is uh responsible uh for putting on shows that are about classical training and classically schooled.
00:55:23.119 --> 00:55:42.320
And this might go back to your point, to be honest, Morgan, about the insufferable nature of these people who have such prominent positions in uh institutions, whether they're cultural, whether they're political, whether they're corporate, is that they are such a deeply, deeply unimpressive so-called elite class.
00:55:42.480 --> 00:55:46.480
They they they probably couldn't be any more vacuous if they tried.
00:55:46.719 --> 00:55:49.440
And so the door really is, you know, there to be pushed on.
00:55:49.519 --> 00:56:00.800
The only thing being, and this leads me into my second question on the base, is how do you get around the fact that these institutions are absolutely protected, their vision of them are the things that are funded so heavily?
00:56:00.880 --> 00:56:22.159
And so this counterinstitution that let's just call it a council institution that you're building and that others are trying to build, whether it's Pierre at Verderin, whether it's me and something I've got going on the side, can can we build council institutions that last without funding, without the institutional support, without the resources that such unimpressive people seem to get no matter what?
00:56:22.320 --> 00:56:26.800
Um, do can you can you build something that will endure for 20 years without that?
00:56:26.880 --> 00:56:33.679
It's just graft and you you just have to do your your mainstream job along the side, or do you need funding in the end?
00:56:34.639 --> 00:56:35.519
Yeah, yeah.
00:56:35.679 --> 00:56:37.199
We well, we do need some funding.
00:56:37.280 --> 00:56:37.920
We need the money.
00:56:38.079 --> 00:56:39.119
Yes, we can.
00:56:39.199 --> 00:56:49.920
I I I will just mention that I heard one of the highest people up at Rada in the Rada Bar saying, I don't he was laughing, saying, I don't know anything about theatre or acting.
00:56:50.079 --> 00:56:50.960
And he laughed.
00:56:51.039 --> 00:56:54.800
And I thought, are you that you're you're in charge of Rada, this guy.
00:56:54.880 --> 00:56:57.920
He's one of the sort of chair people of whatever the hell it is now.
00:56:58.079 --> 00:57:05.679
And he spends his time writing books with Lenny Henry about uh reparations, and he's in charge of this great institution that I really believe in.
00:57:05.760 --> 00:57:06.880
I I believe in this stuff.
00:57:06.960 --> 00:57:30.400
I believe that we should be training people in excellence and and and and so yeah, I think you do one one one can feel quite emotional about this stuff because it is it's it's terrible that these ideological characters have taken over institutions and they're much more interested in kind of winning some sort of ideological war, which has no clear end, by the way, than kind of really trying to pursue high culture and high training in in younger people.
00:57:30.559 --> 00:57:32.480
And so we've got to fight against that.
00:57:32.639 --> 00:57:35.039
Can we can we build stuff for the future?
00:57:35.119 --> 00:57:39.519
Yes, we can, and I think we are going to, and we we must and we have to.
00:57:39.679 --> 00:57:40.480
How do we do that?
00:57:40.559 --> 00:57:41.840
That's quite complicated.
00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:54.719
We're not gonna get money from the bodies of money that are basically kind of organized, fully kind of uh uh um in infected with all these diseases, these thought diseases.
00:57:54.800 --> 00:57:57.679
And so they're just not gonna give they're not gonna help us, they're not gonna give us money.
00:57:57.840 --> 00:58:04.800
Maybe there's a couple out there that will, but really, Ollie, we're not even me and Oli don't even think about like trying to get money off the arts council.
00:58:04.880 --> 00:58:06.719
We're just like, no, that's not gonna happen.
00:58:06.960 --> 00:58:12.719
I think we need patrons, we need people with money to say we're gonna help these guys.
00:58:13.039 --> 00:58:20.320
We might seem you have some serious political thinkers on this show, and it's a it's an incredibly like educational show to listen to.
00:58:20.480 --> 00:58:29.039
I learn a lot from lots of the great thinkers, and you know, we are from the cultural sector, but it is worth making the case that we really do need to build culture.
00:58:29.199 --> 00:58:37.519
Like we we do need to have if we are trying to kind of solve these other political problems as well, which we should, we do have to have a big eye on culture.
00:58:37.679 --> 00:58:42.480
And if we don't, if there's no cultural sector, you're not going to win the hearts and the minds of the people.
00:58:42.719 --> 00:58:51.119
And so it's important politically, nationally, uh even globally, actually, to to really see culture as something that's so important.
00:58:51.280 --> 00:59:00.719
And so we wouldn't, we would we always encourage uh patrons and people with a bit of dosh to to help to help out because we we we we need it.
00:59:00.880 --> 00:59:06.800
I I would then add, Oli, and please jump in in a second, but uh we we don't necessarily want charity.
00:59:06.880 --> 00:59:13.119
I think me and Ollie have been very keen when building this company to to build something that's very profitable.
00:59:13.440 --> 00:59:25.760
And we want to fuse these worlds of like social media, the internet, YouTube with live performance, with podcasts, with classes, with the creation of plays and films and TV shows.
00:59:25.920 --> 00:59:51.119
So our ambition with the base is to make it kind of a multi-layered company that kind of meets the modern world and can make money from that, you know, because there's money in these different areas and also produces produces kind of content for the internet that's that's that's of high value and depth and kind of interesting and inspiring, and goes on to produce great live theatre, which is which is to be honest with you, is kind of less profitable, isn't it, really?
00:59:51.440 --> 00:59:53.280
Because you just can't sell to the masses.
00:59:53.519 --> 01:00:00.480
But I think without without the theatre, without that being the foundation of everything, we are gonna lack all the stuff that follows.
01:00:00.719 --> 01:00:06.719
So, yes, we need to build on many levels, but we do need some help, and I don't think we're gonna get institution institutional help.
01:00:07.199 --> 01:00:09.920
Ollie, you got any advances or additions to that?
01:00:10.239 --> 01:00:10.960
Completely agree.
01:00:11.119 --> 01:00:12.000
Yes, we do need money.
01:00:12.079 --> 01:00:13.760
There's no way going forward.
01:00:13.920 --> 01:00:17.119
I mean, not just 20 years, we're thinking 100 years, thousands years.
01:00:17.280 --> 01:00:21.119
Um, but there's no way to do that while still doing a side job.
01:00:21.199 --> 01:00:29.440
You know, we've got to we've got to get some uh investment rather than rather than handout, as Morgan says, we want to structure it so there is a profitable thing.
01:00:29.679 --> 01:00:37.280
Our our big plan coming up is to do a kind of statement production of Julius Caesar, a play we really like.
01:00:37.519 --> 01:00:47.760
We want to make the case for it being a very, very important play, Shakespeare's hardest thinking about politics and regime change, lots of very uh contemporary, um relevant stuff.
01:00:47.920 --> 01:00:56.079
And so we're about to do a funding round for that where we'll we'll find out whether people are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
01:00:56.320 --> 01:01:03.519
But I think, as lots of people have said, I think they really need to, otherwise it's just gonna be really, really grim.
01:01:03.679 --> 01:01:09.039
And we've we've even seen how people can come into contact with this stuff.
01:01:09.280 --> 01:01:20.159
Um and not that it's sort of automatically uh it's like a sort of anti-um, you know, like a vaccination against wogue.
01:01:20.320 --> 01:01:35.039
Um, but it can kind of pull people out of some of the sillier extremities of things and can ignore we always say our plan with all of this to ignite pride in in the cultural past, in the canon, pride in in who people are.
01:01:35.599 --> 01:01:37.840
And you can't build a political thing without that.
01:01:38.079 --> 01:01:38.719
Yep.
01:01:39.840 --> 01:01:48.159
Well, we'll include your links in the show notes, and if people want to open their wallets to you, then you know all the better.
01:01:48.320 --> 01:01:53.760
Uh before I let you go, I'll ask you both individually the question I ask all of my guests.
01:01:53.920 --> 01:01:55.360
So we'll start with you, Ollie.
01:01:55.440 --> 01:01:57.840
What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
01:01:57.920 --> 01:02:05.119
It might have been a moral absolute, could have been something more uh quotidian in concern, and what was it that made you think differently?
01:02:05.599 --> 01:02:10.320
Yes, so it's sort of I did think about this actually, uh thought of my answer.
01:02:10.480 --> 01:02:14.320
It's basically all the stuff that we've been talking about already.
01:02:14.639 --> 01:02:26.639
But in a nutshell, I was involved in very political kind of left theatre in my 20s and early 30s, so very much in those worlds.
01:02:26.960 --> 01:02:34.559
And I did see culture as something to be deconstructed and attacked or used for my own purposes.
01:02:34.800 --> 01:02:40.800
I still loved it, but I I either saw it, I could take it for granted, or I could even argue with it.
01:02:40.880 --> 01:02:47.920
I used to say all sorts of silly things like uh English culture is nothing, it's just European culture, it's just like stolen, all these kinds of things.
01:02:48.079 --> 01:02:55.840
So I the big change for me personally was realizing that culture is something that is inherited.
01:02:56.079 --> 01:02:59.440
You you do receive it wherever you happen to be born.
01:02:59.599 --> 01:03:11.679
I happen to be born in this time, and I have received it, and it is my role, my job, I see it as my job to pick it up and carry it forward into the future.
01:03:12.480 --> 01:03:16.400
And I I would have found that kind of cringe.
01:03:16.559 --> 01:03:24.320
I would have found that I just wouldn't have thought that that would be a way you could think about culture, but I now see that it dies unless you do that.
01:03:26.159 --> 01:03:28.480
Morgan, what have you changed your mind on?
01:03:28.559 --> 01:03:30.079
What made you think differently?
01:03:32.079 --> 01:03:40.079
I've listened to so many of your guests on this question, and I just thought I'm gonna repeat them or not sound as profound as as they have.
01:03:40.239 --> 01:03:47.840
And I have changed my mind on so many things over the last, particularly over the last 10 years.
01:03:48.000 --> 01:04:06.880
I think the kind of once the the world sort of started to fall apart uh to me, the world I believed in just no longer made sense, and this kind of international globalist idea of of of peace and some sort of kind of almost in my head, some sort of utopia that just that fell apart, and that's maybe quite sad to admit, but that happened.
01:04:07.039 --> 01:04:33.599
I think I I mean the easy one to say, John, and I've heard someone else say this is I I do believe in God, and I was an atheist, and I think I was very dead set on atheism for quite a few years, and then I kind of just had a religious, the religious breakdown, really, what I just it all just kind of dawned on me that God was here and that God existed.
01:04:33.920 --> 01:04:37.280
And I and I don't even fully know what that means, to be honest.
01:04:37.360 --> 01:04:46.239
I I I read the Bible and I've you know was kind of overwhelmed by this understanding, this new realization that there is a God or or something like God.
01:04:46.400 --> 01:04:52.239
It's this word at the almost at the end of words, it's like the final word, God.
01:04:52.400 --> 01:04:55.039
It's like the thing beyond anything you can comprehend.
01:04:55.280 --> 01:05:10.960
And I think that was a big that was a big shift in my in my life, but I I would sort of caveat like that by saying I'm not a practicing of a religion, I'm drawn towards Christianity and much of the sort of uh the ideas in Christianity and the church, and and I perhaps should go to church.
01:05:11.039 --> 01:05:15.280
I was going to church at one point, but I think that was that's that's a big shift.
01:05:15.360 --> 01:05:21.280
Uh, and I'm still kind of bewildered about what God might be or what God is or who he is.
01:05:21.519 --> 01:05:42.320
But that that that would that would be uh a big change in in my life and the the the need for us to be strong as men and the need for us to we are going to have to stand up and fight and we are going to have to draw on our masculinity to salvage, to move the world somewhere else.
01:05:42.559 --> 01:05:44.880
And and that's I think we're shamed out of that.
01:05:44.960 --> 01:05:52.400
And I think I realize at some point I'm like this is gonna take serious masculinity to turn this round and deep masculinity.
01:05:55.519 --> 01:05:59.360
Well, thank you both of you for such disarming answers.
01:06:00.159 --> 01:06:07.199
I I I I'm I'm fascinated that through both of them it's like a sense of duty was dawning.
01:06:07.440 --> 01:06:24.239
Uh there was a there was a revelation that was taking place, whether cultural, whether spiritual, and that both of those things have led to you led you to wanting to um stake a claim for something of value that you inherited.
01:06:24.400 --> 01:06:28.480
And um uh I think that's a very inspiring message.
01:06:28.559 --> 01:06:42.639
Uh but but on the masculinity point, I I suppose I am quite surprised in some ways how quickly it seems to be that that conversation is developing.
01:06:42.880 --> 01:07:23.920
So you know, Helen Andrews, the American conservative commentator who's whose uh big article for Compact, the Great Feminization, huge splash all of a sudden all over various parts various podcasts like trigonometry, and that very kernel, the idea that many of the problems that we're facing has been through a great feminization of the institutions, really does seem to be catching on, and this notion of masculinity only being toxic, whilst that stood ground for about 10-15 years, and it was um you you you basically couldn't approach it without being burned, is now no one's really buying that anymore.
01:07:24.239 --> 01:07:30.639
And I do find it interesting that there are more and more people talking about the need for more masculinity.
01:07:30.719 --> 01:07:42.400
I had Lionel Shriver on the show saying she wishes for a more masculine uh immigration policy, that she needs more strong men in the room um making decisions.
01:07:42.559 --> 01:07:59.760
So it'll be very interesting to see how all of this develops because the the the the the paths that you've both been on, and the ones that I can certainly relate to as listeners will will know to a certain extent, is something that many of us have been on as well.
01:08:00.079 --> 01:08:10.400
And the more of us that are going through that, of which is definitely seems to have been uh uh a large number, you know, cult culture, as you know, comes out of practice.
01:08:10.639 --> 01:08:13.519
So, what's to say that people can't turn it around?
01:08:13.599 --> 01:08:17.680
And I don't believe you need a hundred percent of people on the same side to be able to turn things around.
01:08:17.760 --> 01:08:27.039
You maybe need two to five percent of very committed people who are willing to just do what they think and get a hold of things, uh, and and things can turn around quite quickly.
01:08:27.199 --> 01:08:36.640
So, um, you know, stopping short of having our own Henry VIII, hoping that young Prince George is going to be a based Windsor monarch who's just gonna shut all the rubbish down.
01:08:36.800 --> 01:08:43.439
Uh, it's on the likes of you you two and me and everyone else to be our own Henries, I suppose.
01:08:43.840 --> 01:08:44.720
Absolutely.
01:08:45.199 --> 01:08:48.800
Before I let you both go, where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet?
01:08:49.119 --> 01:08:51.279
What can we expect from you next?
01:08:52.399 --> 01:08:58.960
Yes, so follow us on social media, the base, uh the base, is it just the just the base?
01:08:59.520 --> 01:09:02.800
The base creates is is sometimes the best of things to write on Instagram.
01:09:02.960 --> 01:09:06.000
Uh we we should pop up if you type in the base creates, but we are the base.
01:09:06.399 --> 01:09:12.159
Yeah, and we we put everything on there, uh, lots of classes running or being announced.
01:09:12.319 --> 01:09:16.560
Uh you'll see we can watch the whole of Project 39.
01:09:16.880 --> 01:09:19.359
Our YouTube channel as well is very active.
01:09:19.439 --> 01:09:22.560
We have lots of interviews with uh very, very interesting people.
01:09:22.720 --> 01:09:29.039
Um, we'll do some deep dives into ancient Greek theatre and all of the Shakespeare project is all is all on there as well.
01:09:29.279 --> 01:09:31.840
Great to connect a great way to connect with Shakespeare.
01:09:32.079 --> 01:09:35.439
Yes, so check out that for because there's lots and lots of different things we do.
01:09:35.600 --> 01:09:44.560
Maybe I'll just mention for now that we do every Monday night, we've just started it again, but we read through all of the surviving ancient Greek plays in order.
01:09:44.800 --> 01:09:45.840
We're about halfway through.
01:09:45.920 --> 01:09:49.600
If anyone wants to hop on and join join us in that, they're more than welcome.
01:09:49.920 --> 01:09:52.079
We talk, we read the play and then we talk about it.
01:09:52.319 --> 01:09:53.920
Great way to spend a Monday night.
01:09:54.159 --> 01:09:58.319
Um and yeah, I think those are the main ways, right?
01:09:58.720 --> 01:10:06.000
Yeah, Project 39 is is a project in which we filmed a speech from each of the 39 Shakespeare plays for anyone who I don't know if we made that clear.
01:10:06.239 --> 01:10:08.239
So that's on our YouTube, you can check that out.
01:10:08.319 --> 01:10:15.119
And we we are now embarking on a project where we're going to film the 50 greatest uh langu uh poems in the English language.
01:10:15.439 --> 01:10:17.039
So that's early stages.
01:10:17.119 --> 01:10:22.560
But if you'd like to get involved with helping us develop that, perhaps even sponsoring it, then that would be great.
01:10:22.640 --> 01:10:23.760
So we're developing that.
01:10:24.000 --> 01:10:28.560
I have a I've we me and Ollie put on one play a year written by us.
01:10:28.640 --> 01:10:30.159
So Ollie's done his early this year.
01:10:30.319 --> 01:10:32.720
My one is coming up, it's called Man in His Flesh.
01:10:32.960 --> 01:10:34.720
That will be in maybe early November.
01:10:34.800 --> 01:10:43.760
We're just kind of working out the dates for that, and then we are building towards a full-scale production next year of Julius Caesar, and so we're kind of all eyes on that.
01:10:43.840 --> 01:10:51.199
So, yeah, any any support people give us, it's greatly received, even just following us and kind of engaging with us really helps us kind of grow the company.
01:10:51.439 --> 01:10:55.119
And you can follow, you can become a member on YouTube and Substack and all of that.
01:10:55.279 --> 01:11:08.640
Yes, and yeah, there should be another event quite soon where we a kind of teaser for Julius Caesar, where we dive into Julius Caesar, make the case for it, sort of as a fundraising opportunity, but should be interesting in and of itself as well.
01:11:08.800 --> 01:11:10.079
Is that enough things to plug?
01:11:10.159 --> 01:11:11.199
Do you need any more jobs?
01:11:11.439 --> 01:11:12.960
It's about 20 things.
01:11:13.760 --> 01:11:14.960
Excellent plugging.
01:11:15.039 --> 01:11:18.159
I'll make sure to include all the links in the show notes.
01:11:18.399 --> 01:11:20.800
Ollie Morgan, it's been an absolute pleasure.
01:11:20.960 --> 01:11:22.399
Keep fighting the good fight.
01:11:22.640 --> 01:11:36.319
Hope to speak again, and we're gonna be able to do that.
00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:02.560
Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
00:00:02.640 --> 00:00:06.400
I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins.
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Polly and Morgan are the co-founders of The Base, a company production they built that does something existing institutions have abandoned.
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They take the Western canon seriously.
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Both were trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Rada, and have worked in British film, television, and theatre for nearly 20 years.
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In this conversation, Ollie, Morgan, and I think out loud about why the Edinburgh Fringe has become a monument to progressive ideology, why the Royal Shakespeare Company is rehearsing a lesbian Othello set against the climate crisis, why not a single pro-Brexit play was produced in a country that voted 52% to leave, why the head of Rada admits he knows nothing about acting, why the arts establishment that claims to care about the working class has spent 30 years calling them racists, and what it means to build something new from the ruins.
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This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, bespoke academic tutoring for children who deserve to be stretched and not managed.
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If your child needs more than their school is giving them, visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
00:01:07.920 --> 00:01:16.319
And, if you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
00:01:16.480 --> 00:01:20.480
And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
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V.
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Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
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Episodes 1 and 2 are live now on YouTube.
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Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins.
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British theatre was once the envy of the civilized world.
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Shakespeare, Marlowe, Wilde, and it was produced on stages which formed the moral imagination of the English-speaking peoples.
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And then I think it's fair to say that the institutions were captured by the same progressivism that has captured all of the other institutions, whether public or private.
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And they've been captured by those people who no longer believe in that tradition.
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And today I have Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins, two rather trained actors who still work inside those institutions, but are now building something outside them to escape the destruction.
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And they call it the base.
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And this conversation is about what they're doing in the base.
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Morgan, Ollie, thanks so much for joining me.
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Thank you so much, John.
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Genuine, genuine privilege to be here.
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Yeah, thanks for having us, John.
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Pleasure's all mine.
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Let's begin with what the base is, what it is that you do, and who is it that that comes to what it is that you do?
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Sure.
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So in a nutshell, the base is a production company run by myself and Morgan Watkins.
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We always say that we have three main strands to what we do.
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One is the classics, we do rehearsed readings, and in the future we will do performances on the classics in a faithful way, a rigorous way, which we can we can go into what that means later.
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We want to carve out a space for new writers to be genuinely dangerous and experimental and talk about the world as they find it.
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And we want to create spaces where we rigorously train actors and writers to the high standard that you mentioned at the beginning that English, the the the English-speaking world was famous for and was has been part of our soft power throughout throughout the world.
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As you say, Morgan and I met at Rada.
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We trained at Rada, leaving in 2009.
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So we'd been friends for a very, very long time, like 20 years now.
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And yeah, we always stayed in touch.
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We worked within the industry, film, TV, and theatre.
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And around about 2016, things started to, as you know, and you've had many conversations about things started to kind of go off the rails a little bit.
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Um, and Morgan and I were talking through all this time.
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This got to a head in 2020, obviously, 2021.
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And we were just talking as friends, staying up to date with everything.
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We found solace in each other.
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We seemed to be the only people in the industry who thought that what was going on was a bit mad and a bit mental and a bit not good.
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So then we started talking about actually doing something about it.
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We weren't just going to sit by and watch this industry that we love, this craft that we love just be turned into nothingness.
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So we, yeah, we set up the base, we started doing rehearsed readings.
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Well, I should say before that we'd started to go to conversations at places like Unheard and these other places that were popping up.
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And we were really excited that these interesting conversations were going on with these kind of new intellectuals, um, and they were talking about things that really seemed to matter and that were very um yeah, very pertinent to the modern world.
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And then you go to the theatre, and it would be like, oh, well, this is really boring, and everybody knows exactly what to think and feel about everything.
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So we thought, let's do something about it.
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We tried to put on these readings where we actually investigate and learn about the classics, but we also try and match our world of culture, particularly theatre and drama, with some of the new intellectuals, people like yourself, uh, people like many of the guests you've had on.
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We would invite them to come and give a response to these classical texts.
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We have discussions, and through that it's it's grown and we've gathered uh gathered lots of people.
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We have lots of students coming.
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That was one of our aims with the base was to try and drag people out of these institutions, ideally get them before they went to the institutions.
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So it is a real mixed bag, the people who who follow us, but I suppose what unites them is a dissatisfaction with the culture industry as it stands and a feeling that we can that we can do better than this.
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Morgan, uh Ollie was just saying that the objective of being faithful and bringing some rigour to dealing with the texts, the the plays is a key driver for the base.
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Can you uh have you been in the position of working with the institutions which you grew disillusioned with on the same kind of text that you're doing?
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And and is there a is there how would you describe the difference between the orientation of the people running some Shakespeare readings and uh and trying to uh rehearse for a play in the modern progressive mindset compared to how it is that what you two are doing at the base?
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Yeah, uh it's it's very very different.
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I think uh there is a lot of shame uh around the Western canon, and I think it's kind of morphed itself into some kind of sort of uh sort of campification of the whole thing or something, some something like that.
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Then so I think we were sort of, yeah, Ollie's perfectly described the the company's kind of uh sort of intellectual genesis, uh, but uh with we I think we were we were reacting against sort of two things against sort of woke culture and the sort of censoriousness that that created in the industry, and that created in in the c in classrooms, on on TV sets, on film sets, in writers' rooms, on in plays, of course, and we it what it was just very unpleasant.
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Uh it was it was wrong.
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I it was it it was the wrong energy to have in the artistic world was to have a lack of freedom in in thought, a lack of freedom in investigation in into subject matter, and and that should be that was always always my drive as an artist, even though I was kind of indoctrinated in the sort of left-wing world in many ways, I still had that kind of curiosity about the the human condition and and and human situation.
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And I think woke culture was was crushing that, was crushing that spirit, you know, and and and and we couldn't ask certain questions, characters couldn't be portrayed in certain ways, everything suddenly had to kind of conform to these new ideological rules that were being imposed on us by the kind of the rising of woke wokeness within the kind of ideology.
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It was sort of it was almost, you know, it obviously there's no point really going into like what wokeness is here, but it's kind of it's some form of leftism, some form of sort of cultural Marxism kind of uh uh breeding itself further and further into the industries and into the way of thinking to people, and therefore you you begin to feel suffocated because it becomes more and more powerful and more and more frightening to kind of push back and to say, I don't know if that would happen, or would he really say that?
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And could that be there?
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And so that was, I think that was kind of that was one of my main concerns was was the was that.
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And in terms of like kind of to set to kind of move into the to the question more specifically, I think with with the classics and with the world that me and Ollie have really promoted, there was just a complete disregard of the classics, actually.
00:09:11.440 --> 00:09:20.399
It was they they were sort of seen as like this kind of old world that isn't that useful, and it's and it was a big thing was they the whiteness of the classics.
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I think that was a kind of there was a sense where you were feel you were made to feel shame about reading white males.
00:09:26.720 --> 00:09:30.080
And this feels a bit dated now because we're it we're sort of a bit beyond this, aren't we?
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We're in 2026, but that was actually quite a big thing at one point, you know.
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There was there was like people were scared to say, I'm reading Tolstoy or something, because you could feel like the comeback would be, oh, why are you reading a white man, a dead white man?
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And uh I I think we've almost forgotten how radioactive things like that were about 10 years ago.
00:09:48.320 --> 00:10:00.879
And so there was this kind of shame around the Western canon, and it was connected to wokeness, and and then I I I I noted, I just felt like well, we've got these sort of two big problems.
00:10:01.039 --> 00:10:06.960
We've got this the shame around the Western canon, wokeness kind of destroying everything, and we need to counter both of those things, right?
00:10:07.039 --> 00:10:19.440
We need to have pride in the Western canon, we actually don't know the Western canon well enough, and so that's kind of a sort of two-pronged thing that I think me and Ollie were trying to deal with was like the lack of freedom and then this this shame around the Western canon.
00:10:19.519 --> 00:10:35.120
So we were like, unapologetically, we're gonna start a company that kind of that that revels in the Western canon and studies the Western canon and effectively emits a great amount of humility towards the Western Canon, because I think we also, me and Ollie didn't quite know enough about the Western Canon, and we still don't, right?
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You know, we're still we're learning, but we wanted to bring that kind of pride back into it.
00:10:39.200 --> 00:11:06.799
And when you study the Western Canon, it it's very vital and it's it's very it's very complex, there's there's much in it, and the the rooms I was in to kind of finally get around to your question in some ways is that the it the the the it had been taken over completely by what I would perhaps see as kind of quite feminized, quite campified version of the West's history, and so and I I wanted to counter that.
00:11:06.879 --> 00:11:18.399
I wanted to I said, no, no, I don't think this play is about that or this, and uh we need to we need to kind of explore the vitality and the danger and the and the masculinity of these characters and not be ashamed of that.
00:11:18.559 --> 00:11:36.320
And so I I I think I just wanted to counter that, or even okay, this is John, just to even let me try and really get into this here is that in scenes in drama, there is often a direct conflict between the sexes as an example, right?
00:11:36.480 --> 00:11:39.120
The scene, the play itself is about that.
00:11:39.679 --> 00:11:54.639
When you can no longer discuss what that even is, you can't even explore the scene, and so you're going into drama schools and you're having to do talk about a scene, and you're actually not allowed to frame the scene in its correct context.
00:11:54.799 --> 00:12:00.559
You have to frame it in a sort of genderless context, otherwise, you're gonna offend everyone.
00:12:00.720 --> 00:12:02.000
And that was something I saw.
00:12:02.080 --> 00:12:13.279
And I actually know a famous, a really famous teacher left a drama school, and on her last day, she said to them, Can I just tell you that some scenes are about women and some scenes are about men?
00:12:13.679 --> 00:12:20.240
And the this is really important in the drama, and we had to we had to counsel that.
00:12:20.320 --> 00:12:23.360
I had to counsel that as an individual, and me and Oli have to counsel that as a company.
00:12:23.440 --> 00:12:33.759
We have to look at this and we have to take it head on and say, No, I'm not gonna be ashamed to say that Romeo and Juliet is about the love between a man and a woman, and a young man and a young woman.
00:12:33.919 --> 00:12:40.480
And so, yes, I I I've spoken quite a lot there, but I think it's probably probably a fair bit in there to kind of riff off.
00:12:40.879 --> 00:12:42.879
Well, a few things to riff off.
00:12:42.960 --> 00:13:06.639
One, the campification of the the the theatrical world, um, but two this point you make about hyper-egalitarianism, a neutralising of differences, but I would say only when it comes to relations between men and women, because you can find thousands of examples of when difference is totally celebrated.
00:13:06.720 --> 00:13:07.600
So I'll give an example.
00:13:07.679 --> 00:13:14.000
I'm as the crow flies about 80 miles south of Edinburgh, famous for the fringe festival.
00:13:14.159 --> 00:13:18.159
Uh that that festival started in the 1940s, I think.
00:13:18.320 --> 00:13:25.360
It used to be uh it wasn't programmed, it was just uninvited people would come and they would do shows, and now it's fully programmed.
00:13:25.440 --> 00:13:30.159
And the program tells you about the ideological proclivities of the people who put them on.
00:13:30.399 --> 00:13:36.879
And it shows perfectly what Eric Kaufman talks about in taboo, this progressive capture of cultural institutions.
00:13:37.039 --> 00:13:43.200
It's the natural result of self-selecting of a self-selective monoculture through hiring, through funding, through programming.
00:13:43.279 --> 00:13:45.360
And the French programme for 2026.
00:13:45.440 --> 00:13:49.279
Here are a few examples of what uh of what has been put on.
00:13:49.440 --> 00:13:53.360
You've got Capitalism, three gays tried to fix the economy.
00:13:53.519 --> 00:13:57.759
That's capitalism examined through a quote, distinctly queer lens.
00:13:57.919 --> 00:14:02.240
Then you've got Slayers, a one-woman show about the manosphere's effects on women.
00:14:02.559 --> 00:14:12.399
Peregrinations, migration explored through, quote, stories of courage, loss, and resilience, unquote, reveal how borders become inscribed on human identity.
00:14:13.039 --> 00:14:18.960
Uh Confessions of a mulatto love child, a bold intimate piece about identity.
00:14:19.120 --> 00:14:21.360
You know, it goes, it goes on and on.
00:14:21.519 --> 00:14:34.960
Uh and um I suppose what I'm trying to say is this is the very perfect example of that San Franciscan revolution of the valorization of the self and of the minoritization of peoples.
00:14:35.200 --> 00:14:53.600
Um, and I suppose as two people who both are still part of the incumbent institutions, some of them are very fancy buildings and long histories, but very hollowed out of substance, as our friend and colleague Pierre Darangsa has argued, um you're also building something new.
00:14:53.759 --> 00:15:02.799
So I suppose my question then, uh open to either of you, whoever gets to it first, fingers on the buzzer, is the fr is is are places like the fringe recoverable?
00:15:03.039 --> 00:15:11.039
Or once you reach that certain density of ideological monoculture, is it time to do a Henry VIII dissolution?
00:15:11.200 --> 00:15:12.720
That's the only way forward.
00:15:13.600 --> 00:15:20.000
Um I would certainly not be against a dissolution of of the fringe.
00:15:20.240 --> 00:15:27.840
And I think your list is very is very helpful there because I there some people kind of believe that this happened, but we've moved on.
00:15:28.080 --> 00:15:31.519
And as you as you rightly provide evidence for, we we haven't.
00:15:31.600 --> 00:15:32.480
It's it's still going on.
00:15:32.639 --> 00:15:41.679
To give you another example, the RSC in rehear are in rehearsals at the moment for a lesbian Othello set against the backdrop of the climate crisis, right?
00:15:43.120 --> 00:15:48.960
And I think it's an interesting question, isn't quite what you asked, but I will hopefully get around to it.
00:15:49.120 --> 00:15:53.039
It's an interesting question to go, where did this where did this come from?
00:15:53.679 --> 00:16:12.080
Because I think most people would recognise that this is a kind of endpoint that's that's just really silly, and is the is the result of well I'll try and get into what it's the result of, but at least we can try and agree that this where we are now is silly, right?
00:16:12.960 --> 00:16:24.399
But I would say that it is the result of a couple of generations of attitude to theatre specifically, um, and that's what we're trying to redress.
00:16:24.799 --> 00:16:29.519
I think okay, before I go into that, I'll just just answer your question a bit more directly.
00:16:30.240 --> 00:16:36.240
Part of the whole point of setting up is the base that we we came to the conclusion that the institutions were not reformable.
00:16:37.039 --> 00:16:38.559
We know the people who run them.
00:16:38.960 --> 00:16:39.440
We know them.
00:16:39.600 --> 00:16:48.159
Unless the incentive structure is completely changed and the educational feed pipeline is completely changed.
00:16:48.240 --> 00:16:50.639
I I just don't think they're going to be reformable.
00:16:50.879 --> 00:16:58.240
The very best thing, best case scenario is they might try and go back to pre-woke situation, which is what a lot of theatres are trying to do.
00:16:58.399 --> 00:16:59.600
It's kind of not working.
00:16:59.840 --> 00:17:06.960
The people who work in their bars, the users of theatre are still are still very woke and they're still exerting quite a lot of pressure on them.
00:17:07.119 --> 00:17:08.799
So that was always our starting place.
00:17:09.039 --> 00:17:19.200
But I would argue that this and s this this silly uh point that we've got in now is actually the result of like a couple of generations ago bad decisions.
00:17:19.359 --> 00:17:25.039
And the decisions were that they um they thought that culture was like a permanent thing.
00:17:25.279 --> 00:17:30.640
There's an interview with Peter Brook where he does this Hamlet where he's cut it all apart and done lots of crazy things to it.
00:17:31.039 --> 00:17:40.720
And he says, I'm allowed to do this because the book, Shakespeare's Hamlet, exists in the library, and that's there, and that's not gonna change, so I can do whatever the hell I like with it.
00:17:40.880 --> 00:17:44.079
And that was the sort of boomer liberal attitude to culture.
00:17:44.319 --> 00:17:46.799
All these theatre directors, Peter Brooke, David Hare.
00:17:47.200 --> 00:17:50.960
They were reacting themselves to a very stuffy culture, I'm sure.
00:17:51.279 --> 00:17:56.160
Lots of um just talking heads and maybe quite academic and quite dull theaters.
00:17:56.400 --> 00:18:06.000
They were trying to shake it up, they were trying to kick out the arse, they were like, let's do something crazy with it, let's queerify it, let's change the genders, all this, all this kind of stuff that we see.
00:18:06.160 --> 00:18:21.359
But I think what they the mistake they made was, and I fell into this as well, was believing that that culture would just stay there, it would the culture would be sufficiently served by just being in a library.
00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:22.799
Like it has to be a living thing.
00:18:23.039 --> 00:18:30.240
That's what we've always kind of thought, that's why we've always been actually doing things and trying to be in action all the time.
00:18:30.400 --> 00:18:34.000
Because unless you actually live it, I think it will just disappear.
00:18:34.160 --> 00:18:45.920
And I think we have found that over the last couple of generations, because we haven't been cultivating it and preserving it and being engaged with it, it has started to disappear.
00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:48.400
Um, and that's just gonna that's just gonna accelerate.
00:18:48.480 --> 00:18:54.240
Because there's things in like take Hamlet for example, there's things that you actually can't get from just reading it in the book.
00:18:54.480 --> 00:19:01.039
There's things that you only get from the like there's uh a professor called Neville Coghill talks about Shakespeare's visual meaning.
00:19:01.279 --> 00:19:13.519
There's certain meanings that you only receive from the arrangement of space and bodies that Shakespeare has like encoded into the text, and you're not gonna get that unless it's living and lively.
00:19:13.599 --> 00:19:17.039
So there's going to be a severing point if if that happens.
00:19:17.200 --> 00:19:19.440
Um but yes.
00:19:20.640 --> 00:19:40.079
Culture in general, that it isn't something that is frozen in amber, and so in some respects, you can actually have sympathy for those people who are trying to meld it through their own cultural reality of how it is that they live their lives.
00:19:40.319 --> 00:19:47.039
So, in some ways, I can be quite sympathetic to the idea of um applying a new lens on it.
00:19:47.200 --> 00:19:52.880
However, I suppose um let's let's unpack a pretty common argument here.
00:19:52.960 --> 00:19:56.240
So the progressive argument is someone like Shakespeare belongs to everyone.
00:19:56.400 --> 00:20:06.079
Classics are universal, let's make them accessible, and so diverse casting, contemporary settings, and that ideological reinterpretation we're talking about.
00:20:06.240 --> 00:20:19.680
And then I suppose what we've just been talking about is sometimes the the interpretation of some conservatives that believe Shakespeare belongs to a specific tradition should be performed with fidelity to that tradition, but it's kind of set and fixed.
00:20:19.920 --> 00:20:27.599
But I think you two have a third position, which is anyone can do Shakespeare, but he has to be met on his terms.
00:20:27.839 --> 00:20:32.400
Um the taxi authority, it's not the director's politics.
00:20:32.880 --> 00:20:47.519
So, one is that right, um, and what do you know, what do you notice when you put Shakespeare or any of those classics in a room full of people without any of that ideological apparatus?
00:20:48.559 --> 00:20:50.720
Yeah, it's a tri it's it's tricky, isn't it?
00:20:50.880 --> 00:21:01.920
Because we we are fighting against these sort of different instincts of conservation and kind of futurism or something like that, you know, trying to work out how the old can become new.
00:21:02.000 --> 00:21:07.599
And so we don't want to become too stuffy and antiquated in our sort of love of the Western canon.
00:21:07.680 --> 00:21:11.839
It has to be there has to be something vital and new fizzing out of it.
00:21:12.000 --> 00:21:16.079
I think that's a nice phrase you use there, John, about uh meeting him on his terms.
00:21:16.319 --> 00:21:24.640
His terms are complicated and they're not straightforward, but there is something about at least aiming towards something like that when you're when you're approaching the text.
00:21:24.720 --> 00:21:26.799
It's like, where where is this character?
00:21:26.880 --> 00:21:28.400
You know, like what are they talking about?
00:21:28.559 --> 00:21:33.279
What can we what can we take from this um from this feature or this scene or this play?
00:21:33.359 --> 00:21:34.400
What can we understand?
00:21:34.640 --> 00:21:49.200
And yeah, like trying not to put like an ideological lens on that, not trying not to see the character through like a feminist lens or a kind of post colonial lens or something, which is very likely what you would have been studying probably uh from the 80s onwards.
00:21:49.440 --> 00:21:56.960
Uh I I I think I think Shakespeare is very difficult and it reveals how stupid many of us become.
00:21:57.119 --> 00:21:59.519
I think syntactically you can see that.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:07.519
You can you you when you read it, it's incredibly complicated uh to understand uh unless you're extraordinarily intelligent.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:15.440
And and I I find that fascinating because it suggests to me that Shakespeare was probably writing for people he assumed would understand this.
00:22:15.680 --> 00:22:17.599
So that's interesting to think of, isn't it?
00:22:17.680 --> 00:22:24.000
That we we maybe have kind of uh fallen, basically, in in our understanding of syntax and language.
00:22:24.240 --> 00:22:37.200
I I I I I just love bringing uh Shakespeare uh to everyone, and that's that's that sounds quite sort of uh kind of uh woke or stuff, but I'm not fully against all these ideas uh, you know, on the on the left.
00:22:37.279 --> 00:22:42.720
There's some ideas that I'm like, yeah, you don't want this to be just some elitist thing that only posh people can access.
00:22:42.880 --> 00:22:44.240
That's that's not right, you know.
00:22:44.480 --> 00:22:56.240
And uh I I think if you bring Shakespeare in a room and you meet and you just study it with people and you try and understand it and you work on it with students, uh you'd be surprised how quickly it can come to life.
00:22:56.319 --> 00:22:58.640
It can take a few weeks, but it is accessible actually.
00:22:58.720 --> 00:23:05.920
It just takes a kind of a bit of hard work, uh, uh understanding the rhythms, understand the thoughts, understand the character situation.
00:23:06.079 --> 00:23:12.319
Oli's got a lovely theory on this called Stirs, which perhaps you can explain a bit, Ollie, in a second.
00:23:12.480 --> 00:23:21.920
Um, but it's yeah, it's great to bring, I think, I think actually you can bring it, it's not necessarily Elite Shakespeare, but it is very complicated and it demands a lot of people.
00:23:22.160 --> 00:23:26.960
And you you you know, don't waste your time with all these stupid lenses.
00:23:27.039 --> 00:23:32.559
Like there's enough, there's enough challenges in there than than kind of worrying about where you're framing this for now.
00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:35.440
We we we really the problem is really not that at the moment.
00:23:35.599 --> 00:23:41.279
The problem is that we just need to bring this back to life in its purity, in its situation.
00:23:41.519 --> 00:23:45.680
And and I think we're I'm interested in doing that as a teacher, and I think Ollie is too.
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:47.519
Well, that's what we tried to do.
00:23:47.920 --> 00:23:52.640
Yeah, brilliant phrase, John, but then we could uh I could put it uh meeting Shakespeare on on his own terms.
00:23:52.799 --> 00:24:03.599
Um that's what we tried to do with the Project 39, which people might have seen the Shakespeare project, where we filmed the speech from every every play, and we've put it online, we've put on YouTube, you have some great actors.
00:24:03.839 --> 00:24:09.440
And the idea was to to try and strip it of any ideological framing.
00:24:09.680 --> 00:24:13.839
Um, because yeah, I agree with what with what Morgan just said.
00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:15.680
We're we're not even ready for that yet.
00:24:15.759 --> 00:24:18.000
We actually have to just know the stuff.
00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:23.200
We've had a couple of generations, as I was saying, of deconstruction, that there's nothing left to deconstruct anymore.
00:24:23.359 --> 00:24:27.359
Yeah, we have to just rebuild some basic knowledge of the thing.
00:24:27.680 --> 00:24:31.599
So that's the first that's the first step, that's the first port of call.
00:24:31.839 --> 00:24:41.920
Um uh, but I think there's yeah, there's something of there is a lot of power in Shakespeare's language, and that's what we tried to bring to the fore with Project 39.
00:24:42.240 --> 00:24:50.960
When the actors really embody it, um it has a vitality and it has a a weight and and heat of thinking.
00:24:51.119 --> 00:25:08.400
Like sometimes as Morgan was saying, Shakespeare's syntax gets so complicated, actually, because it's just under the pressure of such emotional and intellectual intensity that it's almost like the language begins to warp because and theatre is a very pressurized form, it's quite a short form as as art forms go.
00:25:08.480 --> 00:25:13.599
So the language starts to kind of warp under this this this emotional heat, which is which is amazing.
00:25:13.839 --> 00:25:30.640
But your question is is the million-dollar question in a way, like how do we conserve culture without being silly, as most people would understand it, but how do we not make it stuffy and just the purview of a few uh Tory boys and girls?
00:25:30.799 --> 00:25:35.119
Um how do we make it uh sort of accessible?
00:25:35.359 --> 00:25:38.640
Okay, so I saw a Shakespeare show a a few weeks ago.
00:25:38.799 --> 00:25:41.119
Well, I won't say where it wasn't very good, right?
00:25:41.440 --> 00:25:46.079
And it wasn't very good because it was totally patronizing to the audience.
00:25:46.319 --> 00:26:00.640
If anyone's been to see a Shakespeare show, I guarantee they would have seen some kind of actor doing some kind of hip gyration on any vaguely sexual line, which that should be banned, um because it's just very, very cheap.
00:26:00.799 --> 00:26:05.680
And uh they're sort of saying to the audience, you don't get this, but it's okay.
00:26:06.079 --> 00:26:15.839
We can make it slightly silly and it always kind of camp, backing away from the vitality, from the power of it, backing away from the difficulty of it, backing away from the weirdness of it.
00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:20.240
Shakespeare's really weird, always sort of cosmically weird stuff going on in the tragedies.
00:26:20.559 --> 00:26:43.200
I was sitting there in the audience thinking, I genuinely think if they'd have done, it was as you like it, if they'd have done this kind of seriously, I'm taking it seriously, actually lent into its power and its complexity, people would meet it, or or they would have some kind of experience rather than this fake kind of non-experience where they think they've kind of got it, but they but they basically haven't.
00:26:43.359 --> 00:26:51.599
Um, so it's some way of doing Shakespeare like that, where we don't dumb him down, but of course we can do things.
00:26:51.759 --> 00:26:57.440
I mean, the ideal situation would be for people to vote with their feet, I think, kind of surely.
00:26:57.599 --> 00:27:08.160
You can you can do your lesbian hello against the backdrop of climate change, but we can also do a really vital, weird, powerful Julius Caesar, and people can see what they prefer.
00:27:08.400 --> 00:27:16.799
At the moment, the funding apparatus is set up that one gets all the money and we get no money, so it's it's that that needs to kind of change.
00:27:16.960 --> 00:27:24.799
And and I I I obviously we believe that people would prefer what we do, but you know, we we have to see.
00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:57.039
Your point about theatre or cultural artifacts not being just for for posh Tory boys and posh people in general is is actually a vital one because I do have just a general concern, and it's something that I felt very much going through my schooling, was there is a disdain in the country for uh intellectualism of any sort, but also uh culture like this in some way.
00:27:57.200 --> 00:27:59.599
Um, and the disdain comes from both ways.
00:27:59.680 --> 00:28:09.920
There's kind of a top-down disdain to those people who might not get it because they're not educated, and then there's the kind of bottom-up disdain, insofar as you can be like, oh, well, that's just a bit silly, what's the point?
00:28:10.160 --> 00:28:24.000
But what's really annoying is that at some point in the last couple of hundred years, there actually was a very vital organic culture amongst people of the working classes, which I talked about to death on this podcast at this point.
00:28:24.160 --> 00:28:44.799
You know, there was a deep intellectual life, people who did read the classics on their own terms, who did come up with their own institutions that were self-funded through small contributions where they met and they read things together and they learned to debate and they learned to act and they learned to sing and they did all of these things, and then they go to these theatre productions which were put down in mining villages and all the rest of it, and nothing was dumbed down.
00:28:44.960 --> 00:28:56.319
And what they recognized in that was human dignity, they rec rec recognized the the um the excellence that can be contained within literature and being able to raise themselves up to that excellence.
00:28:56.559 --> 00:29:20.799
And the point you make about gyrating hips and campified plays, just to get a bit of a cheap laugh, because it can't be bothered to explain things, or or or they they think people are going to be uncomfortable in sitting with something that isn't just put on a plate for them, and so they just make a mockery of it, is it's just another way of having a tyranny of low expectations.
00:29:21.279 --> 00:29:40.640
And I I I, for one, am someone who's all for, you know, use use the flowery language, you go for the depth, even if even if the modern world is totally diracinated and just devoid of depth at this point and people's brains aren't switched on, is I do think people are like moths to the flame.
00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:48.319
If there's that little bit of weirdness or something which feels poignant, if they're captured in that moment, it's gonna lead them on to go and explore.
00:29:48.480 --> 00:29:59.920
But if everyone just says, well, you're not gonna get it, we'll just gyrate our hips, or or we're just gonna dumb down this plot line in this show and you're gonna repeat it four times in a half an hour episode because you've got bad attention spans.
00:30:00.079 --> 00:30:05.839
We've got literally no hope at all of raising ourselves up beyond where we're we currently are.
00:30:06.240 --> 00:30:06.960
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:07.039 --> 00:30:12.160
I John, I couldn't have said it uh better, so I I may just be echoing what you said.
00:30:12.240 --> 00:30:18.640
But you I I might I look at uh pictures from my dad's village uh in Abertradur, where he grew up in near Kofilly.
00:30:18.720 --> 00:30:25.839
I grew up in London, but my dad was Welsh, and uh there's a working men's club there, a huge, wonderful old Victorian building that's completely abandoned now.
00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:27.759
And there was a library in there.
00:30:28.000 --> 00:30:34.400
And and you just the idea of like a working men's club with a huge library is kind of a wonderful idea, right?
00:30:34.559 --> 00:30:40.000
And we we we struggle with this these problems of can you uplift the masses?
00:30:40.160 --> 00:30:51.839
You know, that's kind of like if we if we if we work really hard with culture, can you suddenly get all the scaffolders and you know the roofers uh discussing whether Hamlet's to be or not to be speech or whatever it would be?
00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:53.759
Um maybe not, right?
00:30:53.839 --> 00:30:57.200
And and maybe maybe that is a little bit of a delusion.
00:30:57.279 --> 00:31:16.400
And you see this even with Stanislavski when uh Konstantin Sanoslavsky, the kind of great acting theorist and director and uh actor and teacher, in where the revolution is happening in Russia, he's kind of taken in and he he believes it at the beginning, and he wants to one of his big things is he wants to get this great art out to the masses, right?
00:31:16.640 --> 00:31:34.960
Uh so this is a great desire we have, and it it's it is hard to achieve, and and we there is a sort of potential kind of maybe like slightly nihilistic conclusion where you go, actually, they just want to watch Love Island, really, we can run around trying to do this, but they just they're just gonna watch Love Island or just scroll through TikTok.
00:31:35.119 --> 00:31:43.359
Uh, and and a lot of people will probably do that, but I think our job as people who believe in this culture and believe in this is to fight against something there.
00:31:43.440 --> 00:31:49.119
And as you say, we might be able to do small bits and kind of have some effect in somewhere.
00:31:49.279 --> 00:31:52.799
And I am interested in reminding the people of who they are.
00:31:53.119 --> 00:32:10.640
That's that's kind of the thing I think is really important about the livingness of the Western text, is to say this is who you are, that this is the fabric of your being, and these characters are these stories, and we need to bring that to the world to remind people of who they are, to to raise morale.
00:32:10.720 --> 00:32:18.799
Because yeah, we do live in this kind of, as you said, deratinated, sort of depressed, deflated, confusing time and AI rising and all sorts of stuff.
00:32:18.880 --> 00:32:21.599
And uh what how what what do we do?
00:32:21.759 --> 00:32:23.200
How how do we deal with that?
00:32:23.279 --> 00:32:34.000
And and and perhaps all we can all we can do is fight to carry something through into maybe something that can come in the future, even if it feels hopeless at times.
00:32:34.319 --> 00:32:42.640
Uh a friend a f an artist friend of ours always talked about us as it's quite a sad, depressing image, but there's a there's a um there's uh Ollie, what was it?
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:43.039
The Roman.
00:32:44.960 --> 00:32:45.680
It's Pompey, yeah.
00:32:45.759 --> 00:32:47.680
There's the sta there's the kind of Pompeii.
00:32:47.839 --> 00:32:57.440
Pompeii, yeah, there's the the Roman uh the statue or the kind of remains of a man who was like holding back the even though the the the the ashes were coming towards him or the the lava.
00:32:57.680 --> 00:32:58.640
I don't know what's the exact story.
00:32:59.519 --> 00:33:02.000
It was like a soldier who he didn't leave his post.
00:33:02.160 --> 00:33:04.480
The lava was coming, but he was there.
00:33:04.640 --> 00:33:07.839
So yeah, and you know, probably you you want to be that guy.
00:33:08.559 --> 00:33:09.200
Yeah, yeah.
00:33:09.279 --> 00:33:16.960
So I it that's a very kind of very tragic idea, but I think it's it's probably a kind of profound tragic idea to at least you might as well strive for that.
00:33:17.200 --> 00:33:20.160
At your very least, you'll be standing there in the ashes, you know what I mean.
00:33:20.480 --> 00:33:22.240
Um something like that.
00:33:22.400 --> 00:33:28.480
So I think we need to fight for it for a number of l uh uh reasons, but it yeah, it is it's it is gonna be hard.
00:33:28.559 --> 00:33:36.960
I think it's slightly naive to think that like suddenly we're gonna have everyone you know reading Pinder or you know uh Herodotus and th discussing Thucydides.
00:33:37.200 --> 00:33:39.440
Uh but we should we should we should fight for it.
00:33:39.680 --> 00:33:42.960
I'm st I'm cautiously optimistic actually.
00:33:43.920 --> 00:33:45.119
For a cultural renaissance.
00:33:45.440 --> 00:33:46.559
Quite off-brand for me.
00:33:46.799 --> 00:34:01.519
Well, I think the the thing we have on our side, uh obviously I know it's very difficult, but I think the the opening that there is, or the thing we have on our side, is that the current cultural elites have have completely reneged on their duty in that regard.
00:34:01.759 --> 00:34:10.960
Like they um, you know, there's there's nothing more middle class than woke, even though it talks about being the language of the oppressed and and all of this kind of stuff.
00:34:11.119 --> 00:34:18.000
It um it it completely disregards, is is actively hostile to working class, right?
00:34:18.320 --> 00:34:21.199
So for me that suggests that there is an opening.
00:34:21.360 --> 00:34:30.079
As you say, Morgan people are open to enchantment and being reminded of who they are, and it feels like there's a gap that they're being completely unserved.
00:34:30.159 --> 00:34:38.400
We've seen that gap be filled in other areas, like all of the podcasts, intellectually serving people who are otherwise not served by like the BBC or whatever.
00:34:38.559 --> 00:34:47.199
We've seen it with uh yeah, with news like GB News is a kind of kind of working class um outfit, I suppose, in so it's to give expression to that.
00:34:47.440 --> 00:34:56.639
Um and yeah, there's a part of what we do that does want to give expression to that, particularly in the new writing, we're kind of interested in.
00:34:57.199 --> 00:35:12.719
But yeah, I mean, every the royal court says, and everyone says they're interested in like working class voices and all that stuff, but we would actually be genuinely open to the views that they that they might have that would be susceptible to the royal court despite what they say.
00:35:13.039 --> 00:35:16.400
So we're we're we're actually very, very, very open to that.
00:35:16.559 --> 00:35:25.760
And I think I think something could happen in that area, and obviously we're gonna be fighting against C AI and a lot of other stuff, so it won't be easy, but there is an opening.
00:35:26.400 --> 00:35:27.760
They they don't care, of course.
00:35:27.840 --> 00:35:30.719
We know this, us three, but they don't care about working class voices.
00:35:30.800 --> 00:35:35.039
They haven't listened to working class voices on migration, for instance, for the last 30 years.
00:35:35.199 --> 00:35:37.360
That's just kind of sort of pushed to the side.
00:35:37.440 --> 00:35:38.079
They can't.
00:35:38.159 --> 00:35:46.320
I I grew up, lots of my friends were working class growing up, you know, and uh my my mates were and and their views were always very different to mine.
00:35:46.559 --> 00:35:55.119
I was I was kind of the lovey lefty when I was younger, and and and actually like they would just be quite instinctive about their opinions and they would talk and they were very open.
00:35:55.199 --> 00:36:04.000
This is the thing I always found interesting about them was that I could have discussions with them, uh, and and they were very respectful to the fact that I disagreed with them.
00:36:04.159 --> 00:36:15.360
And I found myself in the arts that when I began to turn around to some people in the arts and say, Well, I'm not quite sure about this, they would the way you that you'd be treated by from the left was terrible, right?
00:36:15.440 --> 00:36:18.320
And it was and it was increasing, and then that just increases, doesn't it?
00:36:18.400 --> 00:36:24.480
When people kind of leave the left, they have that experience where you kind of start to question things and you're told you're not allowed to do that.
00:36:24.719 --> 00:36:28.159
Uh so yes, in in and so on and so forth.
00:36:28.239 --> 00:36:38.559
And uh just my sort of general point being is that there's there's absolutely no connection and understanding of the working class by the the royal court or any of these places at all.
00:36:38.719 --> 00:37:01.119
And any of these writers that claim that they care about the working class, they don't because they've they've spent the whole the last 30 years uh completely allowing these people to be trashed and to be called racists and be called to be called gamons, you know, to be or they've just they've allowed this, they've facilitated this, and then they have the nerve, they have the nerve to say they're they're left wing and they care about the working class.
00:37:01.199 --> 00:37:02.880
It's it's utter bullshit.
00:37:03.039 --> 00:37:18.639
They they are it's it's utter nonsense, they are liars and they are cowards, and we have to call them out, and and I know who they are in my head, I know lots of them are, and uh, and um and we know we should say we're not just talking Abstella, like these are people we know and have worked with, right?
00:37:18.880 --> 00:37:20.400
They're set yeah, they're complete sellouts.
00:37:20.480 --> 00:37:31.440
They don't, they don't, they're not, you know, and and and I'm not saying that I'm some kind of you know, you know, walk your Jesus working or walking around the working class, and you know, uh I I'm just an I'm but I'm I'm honest.
00:37:31.519 --> 00:37:38.000
I try to be honest and say like what what I see and what I understand, and and and that that this is there's no there's none of that.
00:37:38.079 --> 00:37:50.320
And if you don't have that, you don't have freedom, you don't have you we didn't have one pro-Brexit play, one pro-Brexit uh piece of TV or film uh in in a country that voted 52% in its favour.
00:37:50.480 --> 00:37:56.079
And that that just shows like a complete like lack of plurality at very least in in the arts, right?
00:37:56.239 --> 00:38:01.760
Just a lack of a willingness to explore why 52% of people have voted for this.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:03.519
And that was yeah, go on.
00:38:03.760 --> 00:38:05.119
No, I'd say we go back even further.
00:38:05.280 --> 00:38:11.519
I mean, is there any positive portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, one of the most popular prime ministers in the 20th century?
00:38:11.840 --> 00:38:17.760
No, and all my friends, when I was lots of my friends were like working-class Thatcherites, they like Thatcher.
00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:26.559
And I thought I could tell them you can't like Thatcher, you know, because I've just been indoctrinated with the you know, arrogant leftyism that was kind of what you get given, right?
00:38:26.639 --> 00:38:35.280
And not and and and by the way, I'm sure there are some you know critiques of Thatcher, and I don't think me and Ollie would say necessarily like Thatcher's amazing or not.
00:38:35.360 --> 00:38:36.719
We know we we are we are just opening up.
00:38:36.880 --> 00:38:38.559
This is covering my Thatcher post term.
00:38:39.280 --> 00:38:40.320
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:38:40.400 --> 00:38:42.239
We're just we we you know you get it, right?
00:38:42.400 --> 00:38:44.719
We need to have this plurality of exploration.
00:38:44.880 --> 00:38:49.840
Uh I had another point on the Western Canon, but uh shall I come back to it, John, in a bit?
00:38:50.320 --> 00:38:53.440
You can you can carry on with the the Western canon, Morgan.
00:38:54.000 --> 00:39:12.960
Okay, so I I was just gonna kind of add to Ollie's point about the Western canon before the kind of working class um passionate segue, and say that the the the yes, in amongst all the ruin we're experien we're all feeling and seeing, the there is this there is the Western canon and it's extraordinary.
00:39:13.119 --> 00:39:22.559
Uh and it is it's the great thing we have on our side is that in there's other things, but in terms of the arts and culture, it's it's untouchable.
00:39:22.719 --> 00:39:24.320
Nothing compares to it.
00:39:24.480 --> 00:39:29.679
There is nothing in the world that it comes anywhere close to how brilliant this thing is, right?
00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:52.800
All the all the way back to like uh to Homer, to Plato, to Aristotle, to Euripides, to Aeschylus, to the Romans, so on and to the medieval, to the so on and so forth, the Elizabethans, the Voltaire, the French, uh the Russians, you know, all of this stuff, this history that we we all kind of come from and our ancestors have been saturated in, is still there.
00:39:53.199 --> 00:39:54.320
It's all there.
00:39:54.880 --> 00:40:00.000
And they have nothing, they have nothing in comparison to that.
00:40:00.320 --> 00:40:08.400
And so I I think that's something to take kind of uh great hope in, but we have to fight for it and we have to go into it really.
00:40:08.480 --> 00:40:18.960
But it's it what I'm sort of saying is we basically have behind us unbelievable ammunition, like unbelievable stocks, and so we have a lot to fight with.
00:40:21.519 --> 00:40:26.719
Question on the Western canon, I've posed this to people before, but can it be added to?
00:40:26.960 --> 00:40:50.800
And I'll give a quick addendum to that question because the Western canon, as you've just shown through your description from the ancient Greeks all the way down to the present day, was in a living tension between ancient Greek philosophy and the value structure there, plus intention with Jerusalem Christian ideals.
00:40:51.760 --> 00:40:55.280
They wrapped up through absolutely everything.
00:40:55.360 --> 00:41:21.440
The amount of references to psalms and proverbs and gospel passages to virtue ethics to the Stoics, to you know the the list goes on that people just got because it was within their literary diet, and as we've discussed, even amongst the working classes in in Victorian England, um there has clearly been a severing of that thread.
00:41:21.679 --> 00:41:44.000
And so, without that tension between the the Christian gods and Platonic ideals and all the rest of it, given that most people are just set themselves counter to that, even if you're to create art that was in the West, from the West, and might be considered good, and I don't know if there are any examples of that, but who knows, maybe there is.
00:41:44.320 --> 00:41:50.480
Could it still be part of the Western canon if it doesn't even reference any of those things from the last 3,000 years or so?
00:41:50.639 --> 00:41:57.920
Do you think the Western canon, unless it is done within that tradition and speaks to those things, um, can be added to?
00:41:59.280 --> 00:42:01.519
Very, very good question.
00:42:01.760 --> 00:42:04.639
Very very hard question, as you know.
00:42:04.960 --> 00:42:13.280
Um well, I think the first thing to acknowledge is as as you're saying, the Western canon is not necessarily cohesive.
00:42:13.440 --> 00:42:15.760
I mean it's a very internally contradictory thing.
00:42:16.079 --> 00:42:39.840
If we just talk about drama, the Western canon would be ancient Greek drama and comedy, Roman tragedy and comedy, early modern Elizabethan, Golden Age in Spain, realism revolution of um Norway and Sweden and um Russia, and then maybe post-war um working class theatre.
00:42:39.920 --> 00:42:46.480
Those would be the sort of big, big highlights, and there's so many different uh uh ideas and ideologies in there.
00:42:46.639 --> 00:42:57.199
You could even say that the split between pagan and Christian within the Western canon is bigger than anything else that we could possibly experience.
00:42:57.440 --> 00:43:09.599
So I think it's an important starting place to acknowledge that it is an internally potentially an internally contradictory, or at least at the very least, an internally argumentative canon.
00:43:09.840 --> 00:43:18.960
So conflict and agon is sort of built into it, and I think that is that's a good starting point.
00:43:19.519 --> 00:43:22.000
Obviously, I would like it to be added to.
00:43:22.079 --> 00:43:30.960
I'd like to there to be a cultural renaissance in the UK in 2026, I would like tragedies to be written, great comedies.
00:43:31.360 --> 00:43:51.039
Um I think there's a way of doing that in dialogue with the Western canon that is not just kind of cosplaying, imitating it, um, that that is actually a true reflection of where of where we are, but uses its forms.
00:43:51.199 --> 00:43:55.119
I mean, Shakespeare uses the ancient Greek tragic form.
00:43:55.199 --> 00:43:59.760
It's debated how much knowledge he had of it, might have knowledge of it through through the Romans, most likely.
00:44:00.079 --> 00:44:01.920
Likely because he didn't really have much Greek.
00:44:02.559 --> 00:44:06.559
But he does reinvent tragedy whilst remaining true to it, I would say.
00:44:06.800 --> 00:44:14.559
And so perhaps we can use that as an example of how the Wokanon can be added to without being totally severed.
00:44:15.599 --> 00:44:18.639
Separate question whether we are too severed to even do that.
00:44:18.800 --> 00:44:19.599
I don't I don't know.
00:44:19.679 --> 00:44:21.920
I I hope not, and I and I don't think so.
00:44:22.079 --> 00:44:25.519
But yeah, that that would be my attempt at an answer with that.
00:44:25.840 --> 00:44:26.480
Morgan?
00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:36.400
Yes, I think those people who are doing what you're saying, they actually have severed themselves from this and good riddance.
00:44:36.559 --> 00:44:40.639
You know, like let them let them let them float off into oblivion, they're useless.
00:44:42.159 --> 00:44:43.760
They've done that, they've made that choice.
00:44:43.920 --> 00:44:55.039
I mean, you could maybe say that they're saturated by language, and we are all un you know, fortunately or unfortunately saturated by uh Christianity and kind of morality.
00:44:55.119 --> 00:45:03.920
We're we're confused creatures who are kind of working with with this kind of framework we'd we've inherited as we come into the world and we learn language and stuff.
00:45:04.000 --> 00:45:08.239
So in some ways, it's you know, you can't fully sever yourself from this world, right?
00:45:08.320 --> 00:45:12.880
But I think they've made a pretty active choice to say we don't want this.
00:45:13.039 --> 00:45:15.199
They've weirdly tried to co-opt Shakespeare.
00:45:15.280 --> 00:45:32.480
That's the kind of and they do it with the Greeks a little bit because they think they can't classics are cool, or like we're gonna, you know, and actually uh one of the reasons the classics are quite cool is because there are brilliant female characters in in in Greek plays, uh uh play after play is like the incredible characters, same as in Shakespeare.
00:45:32.559 --> 00:45:52.000
So so it they almost can't avoid this stuff, but yes, I think they've severed them they they they have, and yeah, but we uh we need to reattach ourselves to it, and I think that's part of the project that me and Ollie are doing is saying, look, we need to we need to get right into this, we need to be connected with it, and it is like is the Bible is the big one I forgot to mention before.
00:45:52.079 --> 00:45:55.119
It's it's that is that is the spine of it all, I think.
00:45:55.199 --> 00:45:57.280
Really, uh it runs through everything, you know.
00:45:57.360 --> 00:46:20.880
You see, you're gonna see like you'll see Byron uh writes this play, Kane, then uh uh Goethe writes Faust, and um uh Y Dostoevsky is slightly different, but they're they're all of these different writers are kind of wrestling with this kind of central scriptural education that is that is permeated throughout the kind of Western hemisphere.
00:46:20.960 --> 00:46:28.400
So it is unavoidable that we're connected to to this book, and therefore we are in some ways connected around these these these narratives.
00:46:28.800 --> 00:46:37.840
I uh yes, so uh I had another point, but I actually can't remember what what what that what that was.
00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:39.840
But uh we need to add this was it.
00:46:39.920 --> 00:46:41.039
We need to reconnect with this.
00:46:41.199 --> 00:46:49.519
I think when you look at the revolutionaries in Russia in the in the sort of 1910, sorry, and you you have like Mayakovsky and Mayerhold.
00:46:51.599 --> 00:46:53.360
They know what they're rebelling against.
00:46:53.519 --> 00:46:55.840
They are they've read all this stuff, you know.
00:46:55.920 --> 00:47:05.760
Uh uh Mayakovsky, there's a character called Vladimir Myakovsky, we did a play by him, a very interesting, kind of slightly mad, huge poet, playwright, revolutionary.
00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:18.880
He was always quoting uh Don Quixote, you know, Cervantes, the novel, and the the the the these revolution these kind of characters that they had so much in them, to they were rebelling against a lot, and you know, you can agree with that or not.
00:47:19.039 --> 00:47:24.480
Whereas today's rebels, they know nothing of the past, they they they have no connection to it at all.
00:47:24.639 --> 00:47:36.639
They're they're just idiots who are just kind of you know talking about capitalism being bad or the patriarchy or some some crap like that, you know, and and and they don't even know what those ideas are formulated of.
00:47:36.719 --> 00:47:40.400
They they couldn't even really explain to you capitalism or communism.
00:47:40.639 --> 00:47:52.800
So they're just it's just it's vacuous, rebellious, uh, uneducated, weak behavior by people we shouldn't take seriously and give any power to and give any money to.
00:47:53.920 --> 00:47:58.400
Yeah, it's like they're um they're just dropping airstrikes on the rubble.
00:47:58.480 --> 00:48:00.480
They don't even know what it is they're destroying anymore.
00:48:00.639 --> 00:48:02.159
For them, it's already destroyed.
00:48:02.320 --> 00:48:14.559
Uh they don't the image though that we uh used to talk about was an image of modern culture is someone sticking their middle finger up at uh the ruins of a church where there's no there's no one there anymore.
00:48:14.719 --> 00:48:18.239
And then so it becomes a totally empty, meaningless gesture.
00:48:18.639 --> 00:48:20.000
Yeah, absolutely.
00:48:20.159 --> 00:48:35.679
Uh I I know we've dunked a lot on uh progressives today, and I think we've I think I think we've uh uh but but but I think we've also pointed towards the perils of the conservative mindset and their approach to culture.
00:48:35.760 --> 00:48:45.119
So someone I'm sure we're all familiar with, Lola Salem, writes very well on this, where she she argues that the right can't produce culture because it doesn't really understand what it is.
00:48:45.440 --> 00:49:08.800
And people in the right today might use um culture as propaganda for the conservative values, the same reason why progressives do it rather than what it was always meant for, which was the pursuit of beauty, truth, goodness for their own sake, and so that's a uh that's let's do uh one question.
00:49:08.960 --> 00:49:13.760
We'll do two questions on the base, uh, and then we'll we'll go into the question I ask all my guests.
00:49:13.840 --> 00:49:17.599
But first question is what does that mean for the base?
00:49:17.760 --> 00:49:26.960
Would you say you're a conservative cultural project, or would you say that you're an artistic project that's incompatible with the progressive consensus, or is there something else?
00:49:27.679 --> 00:49:42.960
Uh yeah, I I I I'm gonna sidestep that because even to label as one of those two, or you've given us nice, two juicy alternatives, but I'm gonna reject both of them as being too limiting potentially, right?
00:49:43.199 --> 00:49:48.960
I mean I agree with you and agree with Lola that there is a great danger that we just sort of do the propaganda back.
00:49:49.519 --> 00:50:00.639
Um again, it's a very, very big, very, very difficult question, but um I think there is I think we need to eliminate the utilitarian attitude to culture.
00:50:01.039 --> 00:50:15.039
Yes, you can say there's always an intention with a piece of art, um as as our mutual friend Pierre said in conversation with me the other day, you know, even a a a love song has a has a definite outcome that it wants to achieve, right?
00:50:15.519 --> 00:50:27.039
Um but there is something damaging and very limiting about the utilitarian approach to culture, and therefore we should actually think of culture as a more spiritual thing.
00:50:27.760 --> 00:50:37.679
And once we've forgotten about usefulness, which is such an ugly, even it's an ugly word, it's an ugly approach to have to an artifact.
00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:46.880
If we abandon that, we might be able to give culture the dignity of give culture a kind of spiritual dignity, I think.
00:50:47.280 --> 00:50:53.679
But what do you would you agree with either one of those alternatives that John gave us, Morgan?
00:50:54.480 --> 00:50:55.199
Uh maybe not.
00:50:55.360 --> 00:50:58.480
Yeah, it's hard to kind of fall into either camp, really, exactly.
00:50:58.559 --> 00:51:03.360
I think I th I I I just believe in plural I uh uh what do I believe in?
00:51:04.880 --> 00:51:23.679
I I believe in free exploration of freedom of thought in in inquiry artistically and freedom of expression, the the ability to be able to put stuff on stage or to put stuff on screen that challenges us and gets us to s to really think about what's going on.
00:51:23.840 --> 00:51:34.400
You know, because we ha we know that we live in these kind of febrile, divided, mad times, and there's so much going on, and there's so little reflection of that on film and TV, in my in my opinion.
00:51:34.559 --> 00:51:42.719
You might get the odd kind of left sort of lefty skewed film, like what was the one, the Paul Thomas Anderson one, the uh One Battle after another.
00:51:42.960 --> 00:51:44.320
Yeah, you might get something like that.
00:51:44.400 --> 00:51:49.679
But I I I guess what I'm saying is that I don't actually want I I don't care if it's I don't even care if something's awoke, that's fine.
00:51:49.760 --> 00:51:51.039
I just want openness.
00:51:51.199 --> 00:51:55.199
I want the we are let's explore what's really going on with different groups.
00:51:55.360 --> 00:51:59.519
Let's not pretend that like every person who's Pakistani is is good.
00:51:59.679 --> 00:52:13.119
You know, why don't we explore like racism in the what uh in other in inter-ethnic racism or any just the perversity of everything because the world is perverse and strange and weird, and I think art should be allowed to explore that.
00:52:13.280 --> 00:52:18.400
And then it moving into sort of other uh areas uh with like Lola's kind of ideas.
00:52:18.480 --> 00:52:24.159
Yes, I also believe we should explore, we should pursue uh beauty and kind of goodness.
00:52:24.239 --> 00:52:37.760
If we can if we can balance these things, I think we're in a very interesting place, and I think we should strive for excellence uh in in in craft, and so I I I I suppose we need to with the base, I just think we need to fuse all of these things together.
00:52:37.840 --> 00:52:50.800
Is like we study the past, we we learn from the past and we we explore it honestly, and we create new art for the future, new stories for the future, and we do these all of these different things at the same time, I suppose.
00:52:50.880 --> 00:52:55.360
So it wouldn't it's hard to sort sort of put us into an exact category there.
00:52:55.440 --> 00:53:01.119
I think we probably need to be striving to create some sort of new world, yeah.
00:53:01.440 --> 00:53:02.320
Culturally.
00:53:02.719 --> 00:53:04.719
And time is kind of running out.
00:53:04.880 --> 00:53:05.920
Sorry to put in there, John.
00:53:06.159 --> 00:53:06.639
No, go for it.
00:53:06.800 --> 00:53:17.039
Um, in terms of the standards and acting standards, as you said right at the beginning, we used to be renowned through the world for and you you watch like a Harry Potter or something like that, and you're oh this is good.
00:53:17.199 --> 00:53:22.719
I've never seen Harry Potter, but this is good because you've got all of the, you know, your gamber and Rickman and all of that stuff.
00:53:22.960 --> 00:53:32.239
Um I can see from my experience of teaching and being in rehearsal rooms and seeing things, I the standards are they really are dropping.
00:53:32.639 --> 00:53:37.119
And so we really, really need to to get them back.
00:53:37.360 --> 00:53:44.719
And part of that, a huge part of that is getting back in touch with with this canon that is uh just at our fingertips.
00:53:44.800 --> 00:53:48.480
Um, otherwise there will not be those those actors anymore.
00:53:48.639 --> 00:53:54.239
Um, and we will have lost a key element of of the truth and the beauty because it's contained in that skill.
00:53:54.639 --> 00:54:03.840
Well, I'm very glad you're both trying to wrest um the the the canon back from the the grubby claws of those who currently have the hands on it.
00:54:03.920 --> 00:54:09.599
And the reason why I say that is as you were speaking there, it brought to mind something that happened recently.
00:54:09.760 --> 00:54:35.599
I was waiting to be uh interviewed, and so I was sitting in a cafe, I think it was um uh the was at the Sinfonia in Smith Square, um near near the banks of the Thames in London, and I um was sitting in a part of the cafe which uh uh was near the doors that came from the stage where I think rehearsals had been on, and I was suddenly surrounded by a bunch of people who had just been on the stage.
00:54:35.920 --> 00:54:39.519
And the conversation was a real eye-opener.
00:54:39.760 --> 00:54:48.880
Well, it wasn't an eye-opener, it was a perfect example of the kind of mental life that people have going on, the the the state of the internal life.
00:54:49.039 --> 00:55:00.639
I heard them refer to um sneaking in things like up the ra in uh various uh stage plays, so uh a good old promo for the IRA.
00:55:00.719 --> 00:55:13.039
Uh talks talks about them stuck it stuffing coke up their noses, um, some of them just hanging around in their bedrooms all weekends, then talking about general sexual debauchery.
00:55:13.280 --> 00:55:23.039
And these are the people who are literally in a building which is uh responsible uh for putting on shows that are about classical training and classically schooled.
00:55:23.119 --> 00:55:42.320
And this might go back to your point, to be honest, Morgan, about the insufferable nature of these people who have such prominent positions in uh institutions, whether they're cultural, whether they're political, whether they're corporate, is that they are such a deeply, deeply unimpressive so-called elite class.
00:55:42.480 --> 00:55:46.480
They they they probably couldn't be any more vacuous if they tried.
00:55:46.719 --> 00:55:49.440
And so the door really is, you know, there to be pushed on.
00:55:49.519 --> 00:56:00.800
The only thing being, and this leads me into my second question on the base, is how do you get around the fact that these institutions are absolutely protected, their vision of them are the things that are funded so heavily?
00:56:00.880 --> 00:56:22.159
And so this counterinstitution that let's just call it a council institution that you're building and that others are trying to build, whether it's Pierre at Verderin, whether it's me and something I've got going on the side, can can we build council institutions that last without funding, without the institutional support, without the resources that such unimpressive people seem to get no matter what?
00:56:22.320 --> 00:56:26.800
Um, do can you can you build something that will endure for 20 years without that?
00:56:26.880 --> 00:56:33.679
It's just graft and you you just have to do your your mainstream job along the side, or do you need funding in the end?
00:56:34.639 --> 00:56:35.519
Yeah, yeah.
00:56:35.679 --> 00:56:37.199
We well, we do need some funding.
00:56:37.280 --> 00:56:37.920
We need the money.
00:56:38.079 --> 00:56:39.119
Yes, we can.
00:56:39.199 --> 00:56:49.920
I I I will just mention that I heard one of the highest people up at Rada in the Rada Bar saying, I don't he was laughing, saying, I don't know anything about theatre or acting.
00:56:50.079 --> 00:56:50.960
And he laughed.
00:56:51.039 --> 00:56:54.800
And I thought, are you that you're you're in charge of Rada, this guy.
00:56:54.880 --> 00:56:57.920
He's one of the sort of chair people of whatever the hell it is now.
00:56:58.079 --> 00:57:05.679
And he spends his time writing books with Lenny Henry about uh reparations, and he's in charge of this great institution that I really believe in.
00:57:05.760 --> 00:57:06.880
I I believe in this stuff.
00:57:06.960 --> 00:57:30.400
I believe that we should be training people in excellence and and and and so yeah, I think you do one one one can feel quite emotional about this stuff because it is it's it's terrible that these ideological characters have taken over institutions and they're much more interested in kind of winning some sort of ideological war, which has no clear end, by the way, than kind of really trying to pursue high culture and high training in in younger people.
00:57:30.559 --> 00:57:32.480
And so we've got to fight against that.
00:57:32.639 --> 00:57:35.039
Can we can we build stuff for the future?
00:57:35.119 --> 00:57:39.519
Yes, we can, and I think we are going to, and we we must and we have to.
00:57:39.679 --> 00:57:40.480
How do we do that?
00:57:40.559 --> 00:57:41.840
That's quite complicated.
00:57:42.000 --> 00:57:54.719
We're not gonna get money from the bodies of money that are basically kind of organized, fully kind of uh uh um in infected with all these diseases, these thought diseases.
00:57:54.800 --> 00:57:57.679
And so they're just not gonna give they're not gonna help us, they're not gonna give us money.
00:57:57.840 --> 00:58:04.800
Maybe there's a couple out there that will, but really, Ollie, we're not even me and Oli don't even think about like trying to get money off the arts council.
00:58:04.880 --> 00:58:06.719
We're just like, no, that's not gonna happen.
00:58:06.960 --> 00:58:12.719
I think we need patrons, we need people with money to say we're gonna help these guys.
00:58:13.039 --> 00:58:20.320
We might seem you have some serious political thinkers on this show, and it's a it's an incredibly like educational show to listen to.
00:58:20.480 --> 00:58:29.039
I learn a lot from lots of the great thinkers, and you know, we are from the cultural sector, but it is worth making the case that we really do need to build culture.
00:58:29.199 --> 00:58:37.519
Like we we do need to have if we are trying to kind of solve these other political problems as well, which we should, we do have to have a big eye on culture.
00:58:37.679 --> 00:58:42.480
And if we don't, if there's no cultural sector, you're not going to win the hearts and the minds of the people.
00:58:42.719 --> 00:58:51.119
And so it's important politically, nationally, uh even globally, actually, to to really see culture as something that's so important.
00:58:51.280 --> 00:59:00.719
And so we wouldn't, we would we always encourage uh patrons and people with a bit of dosh to to help to help out because we we we we need it.
00:59:00.880 --> 00:59:06.800
I I would then add, Oli, and please jump in in a second, but uh we we don't necessarily want charity.
00:59:06.880 --> 00:59:13.119
I think me and Ollie have been very keen when building this company to to build something that's very profitable.
00:59:13.440 --> 00:59:25.760
And we want to fuse these worlds of like social media, the internet, YouTube with live performance, with podcasts, with classes, with the creation of plays and films and TV shows.
00:59:25.920 --> 00:59:51.119
So our ambition with the base is to make it kind of a multi-layered company that kind of meets the modern world and can make money from that, you know, because there's money in these different areas and also produces produces kind of content for the internet that's that's that's of high value and depth and kind of interesting and inspiring, and goes on to produce great live theatre, which is which is to be honest with you, is kind of less profitable, isn't it, really?
00:59:51.440 --> 00:59:53.280
Because you just can't sell to the masses.
00:59:53.519 --> 01:00:00.480
But I think without without the theatre, without that being the foundation of everything, we are gonna lack all the stuff that follows.
01:00:00.719 --> 01:00:06.719
So, yes, we need to build on many levels, but we do need some help, and I don't think we're gonna get institution institutional help.
01:00:07.199 --> 01:00:09.920
Ollie, you got any advances or additions to that?
01:00:10.239 --> 01:00:10.960
Completely agree.
01:00:11.119 --> 01:00:12.000
Yes, we do need money.
01:00:12.079 --> 01:00:13.760
There's no way going forward.
01:00:13.920 --> 01:00:17.119
I mean, not just 20 years, we're thinking 100 years, thousands years.
01:00:17.280 --> 01:00:21.119
Um, but there's no way to do that while still doing a side job.
01:00:21.199 --> 01:00:29.440
You know, we've got to we've got to get some uh investment rather than rather than handout, as Morgan says, we want to structure it so there is a profitable thing.
01:00:29.679 --> 01:00:37.280
Our our big plan coming up is to do a kind of statement production of Julius Caesar, a play we really like.
01:00:37.519 --> 01:00:47.760
We want to make the case for it being a very, very important play, Shakespeare's hardest thinking about politics and regime change, lots of very uh contemporary, um relevant stuff.
01:00:47.920 --> 01:00:56.079
And so we're about to do a funding round for that where we'll we'll find out whether people are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.
01:00:56.320 --> 01:01:03.519
But I think, as lots of people have said, I think they really need to, otherwise it's just gonna be really, really grim.
01:01:03.679 --> 01:01:09.039
And we've we've even seen how people can come into contact with this stuff.
01:01:09.280 --> 01:01:20.159
Um and not that it's sort of automatically uh it's like a sort of anti-um, you know, like a vaccination against wogue.
01:01:20.320 --> 01:01:35.039
Um, but it can kind of pull people out of some of the sillier extremities of things and can ignore we always say our plan with all of this to ignite pride in in the cultural past, in the canon, pride in in who people are.
01:01:35.599 --> 01:01:37.840
And you can't build a political thing without that.
01:01:38.079 --> 01:01:38.719
Yep.
01:01:39.840 --> 01:01:48.159
Well, we'll include your links in the show notes, and if people want to open their wallets to you, then you know all the better.
01:01:48.320 --> 01:01:53.760
Uh before I let you go, I'll ask you both individually the question I ask all of my guests.
01:01:53.920 --> 01:01:55.360
So we'll start with you, Ollie.
01:01:55.440 --> 01:01:57.840
What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
01:01:57.920 --> 01:02:05.119
It might have been a moral absolute, could have been something more uh quotidian in concern, and what was it that made you think differently?
01:02:05.599 --> 01:02:10.320
Yes, so it's sort of I did think about this actually, uh thought of my answer.
01:02:10.480 --> 01:02:14.320
It's basically all the stuff that we've been talking about already.
01:02:14.639 --> 01:02:26.639
But in a nutshell, I was involved in very political kind of left theatre in my 20s and early 30s, so very much in those worlds.
01:02:26.960 --> 01:02:34.559
And I did see culture as something to be deconstructed and attacked or used for my own purposes.
01:02:34.800 --> 01:02:40.800
I still loved it, but I I either saw it, I could take it for granted, or I could even argue with it.
01:02:40.880 --> 01:02:47.920
I used to say all sorts of silly things like uh English culture is nothing, it's just European culture, it's just like stolen, all these kinds of things.
01:02:48.079 --> 01:02:55.840
So I the big change for me personally was realizing that culture is something that is inherited.
01:02:56.079 --> 01:02:59.440
You you do receive it wherever you happen to be born.
01:02:59.599 --> 01:03:11.679
I happen to be born in this time, and I have received it, and it is my role, my job, I see it as my job to pick it up and carry it forward into the future.
01:03:12.480 --> 01:03:16.400
And I I would have found that kind of cringe.
01:03:16.559 --> 01:03:24.320
I would have found that I just wouldn't have thought that that would be a way you could think about culture, but I now see that it dies unless you do that.
01:03:26.159 --> 01:03:28.480
Morgan, what have you changed your mind on?
01:03:28.559 --> 01:03:30.079
What made you think differently?
01:03:32.079 --> 01:03:40.079
I've listened to so many of your guests on this question, and I just thought I'm gonna repeat them or not sound as profound as as they have.
01:03:40.239 --> 01:03:47.840
And I have changed my mind on so many things over the last, particularly over the last 10 years.
01:03:48.000 --> 01:04:06.880
I think the kind of once the the world sort of started to fall apart uh to me, the world I believed in just no longer made sense, and this kind of international globalist idea of of of peace and some sort of kind of almost in my head, some sort of utopia that just that fell apart, and that's maybe quite sad to admit, but that happened.
01:04:07.039 --> 01:04:33.599
I think I I mean the easy one to say, John, and I've heard someone else say this is I I do believe in God, and I was an atheist, and I think I was very dead set on atheism for quite a few years, and then I kind of just had a religious, the religious breakdown, really, what I just it all just kind of dawned on me that God was here and that God existed.
01:04:33.920 --> 01:04:37.280
And I and I don't even fully know what that means, to be honest.
01:04:37.360 --> 01:04:46.239
I I I read the Bible and I've you know was kind of overwhelmed by this understanding, this new realization that there is a God or or something like God.
01:04:46.400 --> 01:04:52.239
It's this word at the almost at the end of words, it's like the final word, God.
01:04:52.400 --> 01:04:55.039
It's like the thing beyond anything you can comprehend.
01:04:55.280 --> 01:05:10.960
And I think that was a big that was a big shift in my in my life, but I I would sort of caveat like that by saying I'm not a practicing of a religion, I'm drawn towards Christianity and much of the sort of uh the ideas in Christianity and the church, and and I perhaps should go to church.
01:05:11.039 --> 01:05:15.280
I was going to church at one point, but I think that was that's that's a big shift.
01:05:15.360 --> 01:05:21.280
Uh, and I'm still kind of bewildered about what God might be or what God is or who he is.
01:05:21.519 --> 01:05:42.320
But that that that would that would be uh a big change in in my life and the the the need for us to be strong as men and the need for us to we are going to have to stand up and fight and we are going to have to draw on our masculinity to salvage, to move the world somewhere else.
01:05:42.559 --> 01:05:44.880
And and that's I think we're shamed out of that.
01:05:44.960 --> 01:05:52.400
And I think I realize at some point I'm like this is gonna take serious masculinity to turn this round and deep masculinity.
01:05:55.519 --> 01:05:59.360
Well, thank you both of you for such disarming answers.
01:06:00.159 --> 01:06:07.199
I I I I'm I'm fascinated that through both of them it's like a sense of duty was dawning.
01:06:07.440 --> 01:06:24.239
Uh there was a there was a revelation that was taking place, whether cultural, whether spiritual, and that both of those things have led to you led you to wanting to um stake a claim for something of value that you inherited.
01:06:24.400 --> 01:06:28.480
And um uh I think that's a very inspiring message.
01:06:28.559 --> 01:06:42.639
Uh but but on the masculinity point, I I suppose I am quite surprised in some ways how quickly it seems to be that that conversation is developing.
01:06:42.880 --> 01:07:23.920
So you know, Helen Andrews, the American conservative commentator who's whose uh big article for Compact, the Great Feminization, huge splash all of a sudden all over various parts various podcasts like trigonometry, and that very kernel, the idea that many of the problems that we're facing has been through a great feminization of the institutions, really does seem to be catching on, and this notion of masculinity only being toxic, whilst that stood ground for about 10-15 years, and it was um you you you basically couldn't approach it without being burned, is now no one's really buying that anymore.
01:07:24.239 --> 01:07:30.639
And I do find it interesting that there are more and more people talking about the need for more masculinity.
01:07:30.719 --> 01:07:42.400
I had Lionel Shriver on the show saying she wishes for a more masculine uh immigration policy, that she needs more strong men in the room um making decisions.
01:07:42.559 --> 01:07:59.760
So it'll be very interesting to see how all of this develops because the the the the the paths that you've both been on, and the ones that I can certainly relate to as listeners will will know to a certain extent, is something that many of us have been on as well.
01:08:00.079 --> 01:08:10.400
And the more of us that are going through that, of which is definitely seems to have been uh uh a large number, you know, cult culture, as you know, comes out of practice.
01:08:10.639 --> 01:08:13.519
So, what's to say that people can't turn it around?
01:08:13.599 --> 01:08:17.680
And I don't believe you need a hundred percent of people on the same side to be able to turn things around.
01:08:17.760 --> 01:08:27.039
You maybe need two to five percent of very committed people who are willing to just do what they think and get a hold of things, uh, and and things can turn around quite quickly.
01:08:27.199 --> 01:08:36.640
So, um, you know, stopping short of having our own Henry VIII, hoping that young Prince George is going to be a based Windsor monarch who's just gonna shut all the rubbish down.
01:08:36.800 --> 01:08:43.439
Uh, it's on the likes of you you two and me and everyone else to be our own Henries, I suppose.
01:08:43.840 --> 01:08:44.720
Absolutely.
01:08:45.199 --> 01:08:48.800
Before I let you both go, where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet?
01:08:49.119 --> 01:08:51.279
What can we expect from you next?
01:08:52.399 --> 01:08:58.960
Yes, so follow us on social media, the base, uh the base, is it just the just the base?
01:08:59.520 --> 01:09:02.800
The base creates is is sometimes the best of things to write on Instagram.
01:09:02.960 --> 01:09:06.000
Uh we we should pop up if you type in the base creates, but we are the base.
01:09:06.399 --> 01:09:12.159
Yeah, and we we put everything on there, uh, lots of classes running or being announced.
01:09:12.319 --> 01:09:16.560
Uh you'll see we can watch the whole of Project 39.
01:09:16.880 --> 01:09:19.359
Our YouTube channel as well is very active.
01:09:19.439 --> 01:09:22.560
We have lots of interviews with uh very, very interesting people.
01:09:22.720 --> 01:09:29.039
Um, we'll do some deep dives into ancient Greek theatre and all of the Shakespeare project is all is all on there as well.
01:09:29.279 --> 01:09:31.840
Great to connect a great way to connect with Shakespeare.
01:09:32.079 --> 01:09:35.439
Yes, so check out that for because there's lots and lots of different things we do.
01:09:35.600 --> 01:09:44.560
Maybe I'll just mention for now that we do every Monday night, we've just started it again, but we read through all of the surviving ancient Greek plays in order.
01:09:44.800 --> 01:09:45.840
We're about halfway through.
01:09:45.920 --> 01:09:49.600
If anyone wants to hop on and join join us in that, they're more than welcome.
01:09:49.920 --> 01:09:52.079
We talk, we read the play and then we talk about it.
01:09:52.319 --> 01:09:53.920
Great way to spend a Monday night.
01:09:54.159 --> 01:09:58.319
Um and yeah, I think those are the main ways, right?
01:09:58.720 --> 01:10:06.000
Yeah, Project 39 is is a project in which we filmed a speech from each of the 39 Shakespeare plays for anyone who I don't know if we made that clear.
01:10:06.239 --> 01:10:08.239
So that's on our YouTube, you can check that out.
01:10:08.319 --> 01:10:15.119
And we we are now embarking on a project where we're going to film the 50 greatest uh langu uh poems in the English language.
01:10:15.439 --> 01:10:17.039
So that's early stages.
01:10:17.119 --> 01:10:22.560
But if you'd like to get involved with helping us develop that, perhaps even sponsoring it, then that would be great.
01:10:22.640 --> 01:10:23.760
So we're developing that.
01:10:24.000 --> 01:10:28.560
I have a I've we me and Ollie put on one play a year written by us.
01:10:28.640 --> 01:10:30.159
So Ollie's done his early this year.
01:10:30.319 --> 01:10:32.720
My one is coming up, it's called Man in His Flesh.
01:10:32.960 --> 01:10:34.720
That will be in maybe early November.
01:10:34.800 --> 01:10:43.760
We're just kind of working out the dates for that, and then we are building towards a full-scale production next year of Julius Caesar, and so we're kind of all eyes on that.
01:10:43.840 --> 01:10:51.199
So, yeah, any any support people give us, it's greatly received, even just following us and kind of engaging with us really helps us kind of grow the company.
01:10:51.439 --> 01:10:55.119
And you can follow, you can become a member on YouTube and Substack and all of that.
01:10:55.279 --> 01:11:08.640
Yes, and yeah, there should be another event quite soon where we a kind of teaser for Julius Caesar, where we dive into Julius Caesar, make the case for it, sort of as a fundraising opportunity, but should be interesting in and of itself as well.
01:11:08.800 --> 01:11:10.079
Is that enough things to plug?
01:11:10.159 --> 01:11:11.199
Do you need any more jobs?
01:11:11.439 --> 01:11:12.960
It's about 20 things.
01:11:13.760 --> 01:11:14.960
Excellent plugging.
01:11:15.039 --> 01:11:18.159
I'll make sure to include all the links in the show notes.
01:11:18.399 --> 01:11:20.800
Ollie Morgan, it's been an absolute pleasure.
01:11:20.960 --> 01:11:22.399
Keep fighting the good fight.
01:11:22.640 --> 01:11:36.319
Hope to speak again, and we're gonna be able to do that.
