continue his journey joshua is to continue his journey towards sporting greatness, he knows he simply has to win. david, thank you. there's more throughout the evening on the bbc news channel, we are back with the late news at ten — now on bbc one, it's time for the news where you are. sir antony sher‘s portrayal of king lear for the royal shakespeare company was acclaimed as a crowning achievement in a major career. the role is so demanding it is often described as the everest of acting, and in his new book he captures every step of the journey. in year of the mad king: the lear diaries, he charts the months involved in researching, rehearsing and performing one of shakespeare's most challenging parts and the obstacles he encountered along the way. sir antony sher, you have played many of the greatest roles in

shakespeare, from richard iii to shylock and now king lear, and you have also written fiction and non—fiction and plays, so what do you see yourself as, an actor or a writer? well, i quite like the fact that i do both, and in fact i'm an artist as well, i paint and draw. a lot of the illustrations are in the books. it's sort of because i have quite a restless personality and i'm a workaholic. so just one of those things wouldn't be quite enough to feed my habit. it's good to be able to keep going between the three. does the writing and painting and

acting, do they complement each other? yes, well, the drawing and sketching, i do when i'm developing a character to try and work out how they might look or even how they might feel. and the writing, well, in the theatre journals, it is a diary adapted from my diary, and ifind doing a diary every day very cathartic. you offload all the stuff that might be troubling you or indeed exciting you about the work, so they do weave into one another. so here you are, keeping this diary as you embark on what you yourself say is one of the most challenging roles you have ever played. for people who don't know king lear that well, why is it such a difficult part?

because it has a kind of epic quality. it's no accident that at the centre of shakespeare's‘s play there is this almighty storm. and you find lear shouting at the storm. he's arguing with a storm. and that's the kind of size of the part, you sometimes feel that as an ordinary human being you are not enough for the part, that the part requires a force of nature. it requires you to be a storm yourself. particularly in the first half of the play because he has these huge scenes with huge rages, one after the other. enormous power and force coming off him. later in the play it becomes gentler

and quieter, which is much easier to do. you do write in the book about your fear of failure, your inability to scale this mountain that is this role, and some people might be surprised by that, given your vast experience but that was how you feel? every time you come to one of the great shakespeare roles you risk failure, but you also have this incredibly challenging, exciting and frightening task of, can you match the genius of shakespeare's writing? because he creates these astonishing characters. and will you be able to interpret them in a meaningful way? the production is directed by the artistic director of the rsc, greg doran,

who is also your partner and the man you marry in the course of the book. i was struck by how much input you had into things like the casting, the design, the cuts that were going to be made to the text, andi wondered, is that normal or do you have special privileges because you are in a relationship with the director? well, i think any leading actor would be invited by the director to comment on some of the things that are going into making up the particularly in the way the design... because, you know, if you were a director you wouldn't want your leading actor to discover on the first day of rehearsals that they are playing it in modern dress when they thought they might be in period costume. you mentioned casting, i wouldn't

have much to do with that at all, although he might say to me, what do you think of so and so for a certain part. and i would probably say, great, let's try and get that person. you reflect on parallels with your life and the lives of lear, and the first issue with your health at times, with your bad shoulder, how useful were those real—life experiences in preparation for the role? at the time they didn't feel useful, they ialso had... two members of my family passed away and some other people that i knew well passed away. it felt quite strange because running through the play king lear

is to paraphrase lear, the smell of mortality, a sense of the fragility of life and human life, that's a terribly strong theme in the play. and here i was rehearsing the part and acting those things but also experiencing them in real life. so it was a curious, strange time. it was often a bit painful and difficult but thank goodness it worked out in the end. you do mention a couple of times in the book the possibility of stopping acting. are you just toying with that idea or is this a serious possibility? apart from anything else, i've spent my career as a classical actor mainly, mainly as a shakespeare actor, and i've run out of parts.

because he wrote three great parts for older actors, prospero, falstaff and lear, and i've done the three of them now. i'm not quite sure where i go next. female roles perhaps? because in the book you talk about approaching adrian noble who ran the rsc in the 90s about playing cleopatra. maybe this idea was ahead of its time! with gender casting being something that is now up for discussion, yes, but unfortunately i'm a little too old for cleopatra now! i might stand a better chance of getting it now than i did at the

time when adrian noble simply said, if i gave you cleopatra every leading actress in this country would lynch me. so things are a bit different now. exactly, how times have changed. so if you are toying with giving up acting, would you ever give up writing? no, i mean, that's what... the writing and painting is what i would do if acting did come to an end. let's hope it doesn't. sir antony sher, it has been lovely to talk to you, many thanks. thank you. this is bbc news, the headlines at

seven, i'm martine croxall. russia tells britain and other western countries it is expelling more diplomats after the salisbury poisoning row. at least 12 palestinians are killed after a mass protest on the border between gaza and israel. a british soldier working in syria with american troops has been killed fighting so—called islamic state. new bail rules are leading to thousands of crime suspects, some involving murder and rape, being released without any conditions. also in the next hour and a new form of supercomputer. scientists say quantum computing could open up amazing new possibilities. quantum computing could open up amazing new possibilitiesm quantum computing could open up amazing new possibilities. it can begin to solve problems that would ta ke begin to solve problems that would take is today more than a lifetime of the universe to solve, in