♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: kenneth branagh is here. he is currently starring in and codirecting macbeth at the armory here in new york city. the production comes here from manchester, england has received extraordinary reviews. michael billington of the guardian says he evoked golden memories of olivier. here is a look at the trailer.

>> what tell me you will speak true? >> you look like an innocent flower. >> is this a dagger which i see before me? >> the door, and they do mock their charge. >> give me the dagger. phil a win this from your hands. >> order kings all. >> from the provinces.

charlie: i am pleased to have sir kenneth branagh back at this table. have you been waiting to do this? it.eth: i have, circulating the copy i first came across was on my kitchen table when i was about 10 or 11 years old. my brother was five years older than me, he was doing it at school. i saw the three wyrd sisters on the cover. asked him what it was about, it was my first introduction to macbeth. it is the same copy i have at the park avenue armory with me every night on my dressing room table. i have been waiting 40 years for that. charlie: is it an unique to do it at this time in your life? kenneth: i think i had a great old acting school mentor who used to run the royal academy of dramatic art. we often talked about this part, he said you have got to wait

until you are the right age, whatever that is. he said to me in my 30's and 40's, you are too young. i really did not understand it, but i listened to him. i revered him. somehow it came together through virtue, through meeting rob ashfield, my brilliant codirector, and finding the right elements, like alex kingston to be lady macbeth. the elements started to pull together. it became the right time to do it. charlie: but you had a 10 year absence from shakespeare. kenneth: i had, and like many things in my career, although others may look at it differently. the sort of accidents happen. you find yourself on a diversionary tract. my wife jokes about it. she says, people say to me, does he read shakespeare at home by the bedside? i said, what do you tell them? she said, yes, you do, because you are always doing that. macbeth or king lear or something. so i took 10 years away from doing it, but quite a lot of

years just reading or being exposed, going to watch it. it is always in my life. charlie: how is this macbeth different? kenneth: i suppose every time a group of particular people do it, there is a certain elemental part of the piece the open. maybe part of the thing is we take a speech at the beginning of the play spoken by a , character called the bloody sergeant, which is the description of a battle in which macbeth is extremely brave and heroic, fearless in fact. interesting for a character who will become fearful for the rest of the play. and we took that, we dared to take that away and put what he describes on stage. and we wanted to do it for a couple of reasons. first he said, when you meet macbeth, you know a little of what they really mean of this fearlessness savagery. , a man who you imagine in first place should not have the problems that he turns out to have later on when focused with

another murder. in battle, he seems fearless. but what we wanted to chiefly do was to introduce to the audience a theatrical energy which was hectic and hurtling, where they can this really be a part of the hectic nature between the circumstances of these two fundamentally, at the beginning of the play, good people who make very bad decisions because the play, circumstances of the plot does not give you time to think. charlie: ben bradley of the new york times who love the play captured that very thing, your curdled forward from the beginning -- curdled -- hurtled forward from the very beginning. you have that kind of energy. kenneth: they were also interested in what goes in the cardinal sin power, and why and how these two people could do this extraordinary thing. when one thinks about it in place, it could be easy to think about it in melodramatic terms, but this man killed a friend of his, who is king, whatever, and he does it very swiftly and

without being consciou -- conscienceed. our production was trying to say, perhaps these things only happen quickly, you know without , thought. charlie: is that what you thought about wife? kenneth: she accurately describes him, not without ambition, but a sickness, too full of the milk of human kindness. there are remarks of her being essentially good-natured, but once he has had this amazing success, the reviews are brilliant as it were, that duncan says fantastic, i am going to give you, i am planting you, you will have all sorts of rewards. charlie: a new name. kenneth: a new name, but i am actually getting my job to him my son. , and immediately macbeth, suddenly is a man with the witches, pronouncement in his

mind a few short moments ago, says why should he be in the , way? i will have to either step that lays in my way, on which i must fall down, or else all leap. basicallyeans murder in this context. it is a wonderful play for putting people in this unusual, extreme position. charlie: the witches are great. i mean, you see them opening up in this stonehenge kind of thing. it is extraordinary, and there is a process one by one. kenneth: what do you think about that sort of -- in the lives of the good and the great, the power of suggestion. some people would say macbeth is a silly play because it is about a man who believes his horoscope. so someone for whom -- charlie: i think men and women of power believe in myth as well. kenneth: it is interesting. and also, a place in history and this idea of what the legacy is. you know macbeth and lady

, macbeth appear to not have children or they have not have them successfully, so immortality is not guaranteed by family. so now immortality can perhaps be seized by having a name in the history books. being king, my friend. charlie: the relationship between the two, is she more ambitious than he is? kenneth: i think she is equally ambitious. one of the things we tried to bring in was this savage world where she says goodbye and he goes off to battle, the idea of whether he comes home or not is really very heavily questioned. and when they do come back, we do present, we wanted to present this very functioning relationship. they fancy the pants off each other and is very passionate. charlie: the passion comes out. kenneth: ian mckellen would argue there are no successful marriages in shakespeare except , he says the macbeths, which , is very strange. they both die and they both kill a king along the way. but i always thought in the first conversation with alex,

the essential to the show and to the performance is that he adores her. he adores her. she is a natural companion for him, and i think that you know, the breakup -- charlie: is she stronger or weaker? kenneth: well, again they both , at different times invoke the dark world. charlie: they do. kenneth: she is the first one to say right, i am inviting evil , into the room. we are in a world where we believe in it. you, audience, have just enough because they were hanging around the stones and they were scary, inviting them in. she is the first to do it, she has balls enough to do it, first time out. he, the balance of power switches. she at least, interestingly from the male-female point of view, he says let's not do it tonight, she says you have got to seize your virginity now. then they get it, he becomes president, as it were and she says leave everything alone, but that he now has to swear off everything and become president.

charlie: and the prophecy from the witches. he is scared because of what they had said so he went off killing anybody. kenneth: essentially trying to square the circle with all of those things. uo who will be the father of kings, he tries to kill both him and his son. his determination to leave no stone unturned means he won't ever sleep again. and that there is no satisfaction. and the first moment we see him as king, he is with her, and they celebrate and the production house has walked on at the coronation. he sits down and says says, to , be thus is nothing. to be safely thus. now i have to i am here, i got a , crown, i have got a thrown, and is nothing. charlie: safely. kenneth: to be safely, and then he splurges in paranoia. charlie: you thought about doing it in the 20th -- way in the

future. you are going to do a very futuristic kind. what drew you away from that to where you are? kenneth: this difficult thing of when you come up with a sort of, what you might call a sort of concept for the world of the play, and all of these plays are very elastic, so they can attack -- accommodate. shakespeare can survive anything we trip him up with. many times, the idea has to do with some reductive quality. you might get you set the , "merchant of venice" in the new york stock exchange, and you might get a fantastic sort of resonance with the world of money, but is also about love, the whole of the fifth act is about whether the girl is going to choose the boy or whatever it might be. so ultimately the futuristic macbeth felt as though it potentially denied the savagery and the primitive nature of some of these motivations. right at the end of the play, malcolm and the new king to be says we will make those who

helped me here earls, the first that scotland ever has. you sense there is a journey from a primitive world into a more sensible world where people will give you an honor, and then you won't the fighting. charlie: it is fascinating about shakespeare. first of all, i think i read somewhere that james v, who became james i of england, would come to shakespeare plays. kenneth: yes, indeed and enjoyed them. he was the author of a famous book on demonology. he was obsessed with the subject of the play. charlie: and the story of macbeth, they think he got from the holinshed chronicles? kenneth: yes. shakespeare was fantastically comprehensive in where he went for all his, for all his stories. and also, he knew how to borrow, and he knew how to be inspired. when we did, alex and i, the cleopatra on radiant. there is a famous speech in her

hert -- in there about sitting on the throat like a bloody stone. charlie: there is a comparison between the two. kenneth: the essential focus on the relationship between to come complicated people, a powerful man with a brilliant woman, and they have a balancing impact. but the bard speech in thomas north's lives of the ancient romans, etc., shakespeare pilfers fairly come intensively. -- comprehensively. he scattered his gatherings, but -- charlie: every writer steals a great writer steals a lot. kenneth: yeah, yeah. charlie: there is also this in terms of, when you there are , these soliloquies you have with lines, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, did you approach those differently? i mean, did you have a mind about them that you wanted to,

in your own vision, not because you want to be alike or different from anyone else who had been macbeth, but some sense of how you wanted to take these pivotal moments? and deliver them? kenneth: it is an interesting question, we for instance with tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, it seems that it grew organically out of this idea that aside from the sort of vast and existential howl as you may describe it as being, it is also at the beginning of the speech a sort of mourning for his wife. and in our production, that is so sort have underlined the passion between them, the simple between the painful, personal loss of a woman that he adored through his own strutting and fretting and idiocy, if you like, informs the way that came out. it became very personal. we wanted to take away from the

show. what i have seen sometimes in versions of the play which is perfectly fine but not to my taste for my particular plot probably -- for this particular play that it be to dry, too , intellectually extreme. charlie: you did not want that. kenneth: i did not want it to be dry. charlie: you wanted to be what, real? kenneth: visceral, passionate, as much emotional intelligence in the play as there is less philosophical intelligence. it can get very dry because the poetry is out dense, so brilliant, so complex. but you know the double up with , shakespeare is that if you connect all of that brilliance, all of that sort of intellectual firepower at this incredible level with the sense that you are watching real live human beings, and there before the grace of god go all of us. charlie: dealing with life and death and horror. kenneth: yeah, sure. here you know -- charlie: for jealousy and rage and guilt. kenneth: guilt, and people my , goodness me, you can feel the atmosphere in the audience. what they have done in the

beginning of the play and in an atmosphere with the audience absorbing the fear, backing away from the thing their fingers throbbing, they have done it. they have put the cold steel in the flesh of the person they knew. king duncan, i killed one of our friends. now what do we do? suddenly they become like children almost. the irrevocable moment, people understand they may not kill a king of course, but they are going to do things from which they can never recover. in one nanosecond, life will never be the same again. shakespeare writes about it, and you feel all of those people go, oh my god. oh my god. that could be me. charlie: right, right. either the choice you made or things thrust upon you. kenneth: and of course it is terribly moving. one of the things we have been thrilled with is people find this moving. why should you feel moved or even sympathetic to characters who perform such heinous acts, but somehow shakespeare's mastery -- charlie: genius. kenneth: yeah, allows you by the end when he loses her and convey

convey- and when he can either in lady macbeth's sort of descent into what may appear to be madness, or what you already sense with macbeth at the end, sort of a grand thing to say, but the bleakness in his soul is so profound that it is chilling. the glimpse of a kind of dark eternity that he shows us is so terrifying that you can't help but be moved because the price he has paid for this moment of reckless ambition is so deep and profound as to shake one to the very core on his behalf. charlie: and lead to his death. kenneth: yeah. yeah, yeah. isn't it strange? in the end he is -- he is fearless in battle at the beginning. through the power of suggestion,

and guilt ridden, dream laden and sleep deprived. at the end, what does he have left that shakespeare seems to admire in his male characters, which i call the soldier poets, both othello, macbeth? it is simple things. he has guts. he has guts. there is the end. -- he is right there in the end. i am going to kiss the ground before malcolm's feet. he has the forest moved it, you weren't born of woman, and a bear against me. you know what? come and get it. and most of it is sort of ridiculous, but i love it, i love it, i love it. what else you got? charlie: show me something. kenneth: he just hangs in there. somehow there is a profound respect for this kind of -- so i never ran away. and he talks to her, and bothnquo, complements them two words, two times uses the , word dauntless. and he admires that, and i think shakespeare admires, and i do

people who take whatever life , throws at them, one foot in front of the other. and the other, just get up. what else can you do? shakespeare often says that. you ought to feel grander than that, but sometimes that is all you have to do is show up. charlie: in your own pantheon, is there one, two, three among shakespeare's works? kenneth: gosh, what a question. your life changes, you have or -- more experience, you react to things differently. you have had many brilliant conversations with harold bloom. he was a shakespeare invented the human. and young caulk, -- a famous polish scholar called him our contemporary. john gilder said hamlet, a play like hamlet sums up the process of living, that applies across many of these plays. right now one's soul is shaken by what macbeth does to the audience. we are there. we are the lucky vessels through which this thing passes

currently in this show. charlie: five minutes before you to go on, what are you doing, what are you thinking, what are you saying to yourself? kenneth: i am meditating. that is what i'm doing. charlie: clearing your mind. kenneth: getting ready. my favorite quote from shakespeare, from hamlet is "the readiness is all." it applies to many things. towhole day is devoted getting ready for that moment. that is what i do right now. people say you have a wonderful time in new york? oh, yes, but partly because i am at the theater hours and hours and hours before any sane human being would be. i do my meditation, i listen to tapes i read the lines every , day, do the whole play in varying ways, trick yourself to keep it fresh. in the five minutes before you go on, you meditate. and the other thing, i swear to god i think this is just the ablefantastic thing to be to do. it is really tingling, you know. it is not an easy thing to do,

and you are aware of the sort of effort in terms of what we do, but it is absolutely glorious, glorious thing to do. i sometimes feel like -- i'm a big fan of sports generally. it feels like you are in the tunnel waiting to come out before huge game. and is like tournament tennis or something. some of it is up here, some of it is in the body. you know, and in our case, we start with a five minute battle. charlie: it rips you up. kenneth: oh man it revs you up. , we fight every day. it is raining, we are in the dark and 25 enormous fellows come out at us with gold pieces of steel. charlie: you have got to be athletic, too. kenneth: it is an all-consuming thing. i think i have learned more about the discipline requiring in this job than ever before. charlie: great to have you here. kenneth: thanks very much. charlie: back in a moment. stay with us. ♪

♪ charlie: mark rylance is here. he won a tony award for his performance in boeing, boeing. in 2007 and the second tony for jerusalem in 2011. he is back on broadway at the velasco theater playing in two shakespeare plays in repertory. he is king richard in "richard iii" and another olivia in "12th night." they both premiered at the globe theater where he served as a test it -- artistic director from 1997 to -- charleswood of the new york

times has written his presence on broadway this season has provided a miniature acting class in shakespearean acting. i am pleased to have mark rylance at this table for the first time. what a nice tribute. how did this happen, these two plays coming here for you to show your stuff? did it happen? it has taken quite a few years. in particular, the artist, the director and the clothing designer, set and clothing designer and the musical director, and the kind of core players were people that worked with me a lot when i was artistic director at the globe. and when my time finished, my 10 years finished, i immediately supposet wanting to, i preserve or carry on the , essential core work of what we did, which was a very careful, and i hope rigorous, attempt to explore what i call original playing practices. what we know of them from

shakespeare's day. so it took a long time. we had to figure a way of mounting two productions that would be popular enough to raise enough money to make a whole new wardrobe of clothes as the elizabethans spent their money of what they wore on their backs. six live musicians. charlie: what was the term you use in terms of original production? mark: original playing practices. that is what inspired sam wanamaker, the american who founded the globe. this should not be only an intellectual inquiry into how the plays might have originally been played and what shakespeare imagined when he wrote these plays, but the laboratory where you could so to speak explore with live audiences and live plays. so he spent the last 25 years building the globe theater and died in 1993, and i became artistic director in 1995.

and his thinking about the globe was really the inspiration for me, which was that he demanded three things, very, very accurateresearch, materials, so we thought very hard for the first thatched building since the great fire. i think oak trees went into it, 1000 line, plaster all kinds of , old building techniques and original craft should be used as well. charlie: and the permits was we would be more inside of shakespeare's head if we did that? or his pen? mark: we might learn, we would learn more about the reason he reasonhe plays and the he wrote them. we would look at questions of the amount of time it takes, how fast it takes, how fast did they play, where the plays cut two hours, did they play very rapidly? was it two hours just to do with

amphitheaters, and where they played at a longer-term playing indoors? for an actor, the space is remarkable because there is no light anymore. it is daylight. they only played in the afternoon. there are two whopping great pillars, so there is nowhere you can stand where some people in the audience won't be able to see you, but everyone can hear you like a bell. so the fact that at that time a commentator like yourself, if they went to the globe and say, caesar,o hear julius they never said said, i went to , see a player at the globe, they went to hear it. it immediately demanded in my time at least, a lot more rigor on eloquence. charlie: before we talk about these two plays, 10 years as artistic director at the globe theater. if you were asked to give a last lecture about shakespeare, what would you want us to know? mark: what comes to the top of my head immediately may not be

the deepest answer, but you just can't, you will never get to the bottom of his sense of humor and his sense of wit and humor. obviously it is well-known that one of the great things he is really good at doing is marrying opposites, juxtaposing, opposing sounds, hot eyes, cold fire. -- ice, cold fire. romeo says that at also one point. juxtaposing tragedy and comedy. and his deep sense of humor even the most tragic moments -- even in the most tragic moments still staggers me. still staggers me. i don't generally find it myself. i find it in performance with an audience there is something about -- charlie: the audience tells you what is humorous. mark: charlie, there is a collective thing that happens when a bunch of people focus on one thing. maybe religions know this and have known it forever, but it happens in theaters as well. if you get a whole bunch of

folks focusing on one topic or story -- one story in the case of shakespeare, and they are all in the same room, it feels like each individual is capable of something more when we are together focused on something, as if the internet is a manifestation of something that exists naturally in human consciousness. that there is a collective that there is a collective consciousness in the room. charlie: the brain, the coalescing of one thing is much larger than the sum of the individual parts. mark: the which became the globe, which is more rectangular or square shaped, and the globe is circular. that collective experience of playing there for 10 years really awakened this to me, more the sense of humor of the author. it is the thing i would say that i would, i would hope would take a long time before the universe

destroys that. charlie: your interest in shakespeare goes way back, to high school? mark: it does. i skipped the rest of the party and just played hamilton when i was 16. [laughter] charlie: you have since played hamlet, romeo, macbeth. mark: i have been 52 productions of plays by shakespeare or his contemporaries, middleton, people who at the time -- charlie: is it any better training for an actor? mark: i hope so. there are much better actors than me. charlie: no, no, to get into shakespeare and shakespearean calendars. is that the best possible training for an actor? mark: no, i would not say that. i am not someone who's only opinion is shakespeare should be meant for everyone or loved by everyone. charlie: or somehow because of the range, it gives you an opportunity to dig deep in

understanding human nature, therefore understanding acting or larger ability to inhabit different characters? mark: it depends how you approach it. you and i could get a set of paints where we do not necessarily come up with the same thing. charlie: it does not come from the painting, it comes from the head. mark: it comes from your life and the way in which you deal with shakespearean material. i don't know that robert ordered tracy or cliff -- brando actually gives the best shakespeare performances for my taste i have ever heard like mark anthony. also you get the testing performance from gilder, very fast. incredibly fast. charlie: why is brando as marc anthony a good? mark: because he is so presence. those words had never been said

before, and he absolutely needs to convince the friend, the romans, the countrymen -- charlie: that has been said at this table before. convince people that these words have never been said before, and i am just the one. thank you for coming. it is great to have you here. ♪ charlie: stephen fry is here, he is a writer, documentary maker and lyrical activist. he has interviewed steve jobs, been to present and he thought he would devote his life to studying shakespeare. he's making his broadway debut playing malvolio in shakespeare's 12th night. i am pleased to have him here in this table. how is it to be on broadway in this remarkable production and laying with -- stephen: it is remarkable not

just because it is the greatest stage acting in the world, mark rylance playing richard the third, it is a double bill. the great sam wanamaker, we had to bring in slightly. the globe had been like a table. it was like a wooden o, and tv is a wooden o. that is like expanding it. so you have half of it anyway his people standing. it is the yard, and they are called the groundlings. they would pay a penny. there were grander people, aristocracy would sit and watch. is more or less the same now. people queue for a long time in line to get a standing up seats, because they love it. and the relationship you have with the audience is, there is

nothing like it. you realize every soliloquy is a conversation. charlie: it is an all-male cast. stephen: it is like an original practices cast. so every single element of the play is as far as drastically we know, absolutely as it would have been in shakespeare's day. we also note 12 night was performed indoors, in a temple, one of the holes, medieval holes the -- halls used by lawyers. we know what it looks like

because it has not changed. and it happened a lot because it was pretty famous. during the hours of daylight, you can use the wooden theater, but you have the rest of the year to keep your actors and from starvation. you go to lawyers halls and play your play. and this new one was clearly written for indoor. you can sort of tell. and for intelligent lawyers and people to come watch, which is not to say it is a very difficult play. it is hilarious, and is fast. charlie: i want to talk about your character, but let me go back. did you want to be a shakespearean scholar? cambridge. stephen: i found it easiest to write on shakespeare, i loved his plays, performing them at cambridge. i thought i would do a thesis, doctoral thesis on some aspect of shakespeare. and go to a corner of the

college somewhere. one of my contemporaries has become the greatest shakespearean scholar in britain, jonathan bates. charlie: talk to me about the part. malvolio? stephen: malvolio. very hard to say who is right. american english is said to be the current english of shakespeare. malvolio means, it is sort of latin, and it means ill will. this character, which means ill disposed. also rather bizarrely there are these anagramatic with viola and malvolio. viola is in mourning and that her brother dies. so she is in charge of this vast estate and she has a steward, malvolio. and she has an uncle, uncle toby, who is at drinker. and she has a chambermaid and a fool who tells us things you don't like to hear about. and the nearby duke is deeply into love with her, but he

swears in seven years you will wear a veil. the shipwreck happens where her twin brother and sister, each believe the other drowned. the sister comes up and the sea captain who has rescued her, she said, what can a woman to on her own, what is it? oh, my brother is drowned, how will i get back to where i come from? i have this trunk of clothes with my brother clothes. dress me as a man, take me to the local place. and this man is a unit, so probably a black boy. she dresses as a boy, called herself rosario.

and then olivia starts to fall in love, but we know she is a girl. and sebastian has survived and looks exactly the same, and he is being taken away by antonio, an old pirate. we don't know how, but it is used by those who push the homoerotic nature of shakespeare. he talks about absolute devotion and love, pure love of sebastian. they never meet until the final, absolutely farcical moments where they are on stage at the same time looking identical. and antonio, he says sebastian, are you? he says, how can you tell? he said, how have you divided yourself? and they look at each other, and the can't believe it. and it means that viola can actually mandate -- marry sebastian, who looks exactly the

same as the girl she wanted to marry, and the girl to marry the duke. and i have a terrible trick played on me because i am a shape of things to come, a puritan. i am described as a curative. he talks about the devil, whether he thinks will impress people. but i certainly don't like other people. i like to be the boss, and i am pleased with myself and assume every buddy adores me. they play this very, very cruel trick on me. it looks as if it is a secret from olivia, the countess, to me to say she loves me and telling me to wear particular clothes. and to smile all the time. and she hates the other person, and does not like people smiling when she is grieving for her brother.

so it is ultimately malvolio the fool who ends up in prison. charlie: tell me how you approached, and what was it for you as an actor to get inside of malvolio? stephen: some people mention he is a pompous, self regarding ass. people often find it pretentious. our job is simply to entertain people. we don't necessarily need to explain the process, but people ask so we rightfully answer. and you have to believe these are real people. in general -- malvolio thinks he is taking care of the house. he thinks he would make a wonderful husband for olivia and thinks it there is an example, the lady of the straight married the wardrobe. there are local references to

times when a servant has married the mistress or master. so he just goes off into a fantasyland. other people have played him quite wicked or highly comic. charlie: thank you, thank you. ♪

charlie: john lithgow is here. he has won emmys and tony awards on stage, twice oscar-nominated for his work in film.

he is playing one of the most demanding and challenging parts ever written for the stage. obviously you know i am talking about king lear. this is a shakespeare in the park production at delacorte theater in new york central park through august 17. i am very pleased to have john lithgow on this program. john: great to be here, charlie. charlie: how does john lithgow and king lear come here together? john: the plate is much greater than i am. i have been nagging someone to consider me for it. probably, the first i mentioned it to him is probably long before i should have played it. but now i think i have just entered that interesting window of opportunity for lear, when your young enough to play it

when you still have the strength but old enough to play it because you can bring authenticity to an old man losing his viability. i know it better than i even realized. i have seen it so many times in my life. i played it in college. but i figured it is going to be such a demanding part. the rehearsal period is going to be so, so tough. the last thing i want to do is to go home and study words at night. so i learned it completely cold on the first day of reversal. the first time i have ever done that. sure enough, i mean, it was a process of stamina building, rehearsing it. charlie: talk about learning. you had a ucla student coming in, he would you use a you knew the lines that led to -- he would cue you so you knew the lines to come in? john: in my days on third rock from the sun, i worked out an extremely efficient way of

memorizing great gobs of material because it came at you very fast and was very wordy and fast-paced show. i trained my assistant to feed me my lines with a three minute pause, three second pause between every single word. and i would drill the line in all those pauses, and i can learn a speech like that once through. that is how i went about studying. charlie: the idea of memorizing things is a great fascination for me. john: it gets harder as you get older. charlie: making speeches. john: yes, right, that whole thing. with lear, there is also a superb internal logic to the writing. i have absorbed it over the

years, all those brilliant and vivid speeches. charlie: what is the challenge of playing it outside? john: it is less of a challenge than a marvelous opportunity. it is a big play full of gigantic passions and gigantic ideas, and i am a very, very tolerable actor. it is as big as the big outdoors. at the delacorte with his hungry audience, an audience of passionate new york theatergoers who have waited all day to get their tickets, they are so hungry for it, they are completely gripped by it. when the elements come along, we had two nights of rain, and yet we performed the thing anyway, they stay right with us. in fact, they think it is even better. after all, i do get to say "blow winds." charlie: the idea of so many great actors performing this, did preparation include watching, understanding, looking

at those performances not too interpreted -- not to copy them but to understand the range of invitation -- of interpretation? john: i calculated this over the years, and you remember all sorts of things about individual performances. the most vivid i think with the very first couple of times i saw, i saw paul scoffield do it. there have been a lot of lears, and i stopped seeing them. the last one was derek jacobi. i did not see frank gore simon russell beale or others. but at some point i had to make it completely my own with no one sitting on my shoulder. charlie: did you see it, what the production put on by your father? john: no, he did not put it on, but when he put king lear on, i was seven years old. my parents you i wouldn't last to the end. no, the first time i saw it was in 1962, the first season of shakespeare in the park at the delacorte with frank silvera in the role. and he completely throttled me. that, you remember, you remember just the impact of a play like this.

it was the first time i saw death of a salesman. charlie: are there other things you very much want to play that when you look at all the things you have done, are there missing elements for you in terms of great characters? john: i would say the only one was king lear. i don't have any bucket list to

play or part anymore. i am about to do a delicate balance on broadway, and i am thrilled to be doing that, but it is not something i am waiting my whole career to do. king lear is. in my experience, all of the most exciting things i have done have been other people's bright ideas, things that i never even thought of myself for. other people think of you in ways that you don't, sometimes in ways you don't think of yourself. charlie: tell me who he is, who is lear? john: in our lear, we see him as a very exuberant and manic and exciting man, beloved monarch. but he is aging to the point where he is probably always had a strain of manic temper. and it is dan sullivan's wonderful concept, in my opinion, the first time you see him he is extremely excited about this plan for dividing his kingdom. like it is something he has not really thought through yet. and his fool is in the scene.

you get a sense of him being a very robust man with a huge, open heart, and a great sense of humor, but he has aged more than people realize. charlie: some people ask the question, is he mad from the beginning, or does he lose his mind over the process of the play? john: that is annexed to a good question, and is the number one challenge is calculating how he goes mad. there is beginnings of a propensity of madness. i think when he explodes completely irrationally at cordelia, it is a shock to her. she has probably seen his temper before, but she has never seen him like this. she has never seen him that insane. this is the first in his whole life -- the person in his whole life he loves the most, and it is because of the intensity of that love that his anger has such a reaction. for everyone, it is a new shock.

they talk about how we are seeing more and more of this. and then in succeeding scenes, you see different versions of madness as he declines into a real derangement and dementia, and the entire challenge with them, sullivan's like exquisite guidance, is just finding those benchmarks, finding the moments. for an example, the moment when his madness, he has these huge temper tantrums with his daughters, all three of them. that propelled him a certain distance towards madness. but then he is shot out in a wild and crazy storm. then he meets a mad beggar, and the sight of that mad beggar, poor tom, who is edgar in disguise, sort of takes it all into yet another degree. suddenly he sees, this is the solution.

this is an unaccommodated man, no more with such a poor bear for. he is going mad. it is taking him toward -- charlie: as he is going mad, it is taking him to some sort of -- john: yeah, madness is vision. it is cauterizing wounds, clearing his brain. charlie: when you recite shakespeare, when you speak shakespeare, what do you feel? john: i am so in touch with the gods of expression. [laughter] john: i feel like it is a musician, sightreading harmless chamber music. a lot of shakespeare is very familiar to me by now, so it is like a lot of classical music is familiar to musicians, it is

just, i read those speeches. there is this incredible intersection of poetry and emotion that shakespeare, to be, he is the very best example of that. you can look at it purely in terms of the beauty of the language, or you can look at it in terms of the power. charlie: the meaning. john: and shakespeare's extraordinary empathy. he managed to do the same thing with the same phrases, you know, that thing i just quoted you. charlie: where do you put lear in all of the characters you have played in shakespeare? john: i actually have not done that much. charlie: how many have you done? john: i have done about 20 plays, but most of it was before i was 20 years old and in small roles. i did play macbeth in college. i played malvolio with the royal shakespeare company a few years ago. but this is the first time i have taken on one of the gigantic roles. charlie: is it something you

wish you had done more? john: i stupidly turned down hamlet a few times. i had other things to do. charlie: was it things like television? john: i think it was other plays or -- charlie: there is this sort of thing that people who are not of the theater think -- that would be me -- that every actor feels like it is worth his soul, i have to take on hamlet. you did not feel that? john: i did not have a burning desire. i have to tell you, to be honest, what i like working on most is new material. i love working with writers and creating something that nobody has seen before. i think there may be something beautiful going on. this is very much my father's world. and i, and i am a terrible snob. i only want to be in great

productions of shakespeare. charlie: thank you for joining us, see you next time. ♪

mark: i am mark crumpton. result suspended president dilma rousseff today. >> in this journey to defend myself from impeachment, i got closer to the people. i had the opportunity to listen to the recognition, their love. i also heard the schism towards my government, for the mistakes made and measures and policies not applied. mark: president roosevelt is accused of illegally -- to heidi deficit trait a vote could come as early as tomorrow. secretary of state john kerry says the u.s. and bangladesh will work mostly together to