John Barton

I think m-my brothers and my sister were, were slightly less interested than I was.

So there was never really a distinction in my mind between the panto and the Shakespeare, and I saw some fabulous Shakespeare in the '70s when the RSC was, was in its pomp, uh, with John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands.

I saw-

Mm

I was mesmerized by him, and I think I wanted to do what he did.

He was a really good director.

When you were seeing these productions at Stratford with your parents, were you aware of those names, John Barton, Trevor Nunn-

I became aware

How they sounded is another matter.

And indeed, there's a Channel 4 series that must be accessible somewhere, which was led by Trevor Nunn, John Barton.

Um-

Beautiful

...

it had contributing actors, uh, from the Royal Shakespeare Company, such as David Suchet, who, uh, uh, come to these fantastic workshops in Shakespeare and classical acting, and must be, had to have a look at.

It's all on YouTube, the John Barton series.

You can get it.

Right.

And I, I'd just seen the production of Othello by John Barton at the RSC, and so I knew how he wanted it done.

So I did it in a completely different way, and I rehearsed it that way, and then I rehearsed it in the way that he, h- his Rodrigo did it, right? So I get into th- this first audition and, um, and that was okay.

I, and I did my piece, and then John sort of walked up to me, and he's a big old f- f- uh, tubby guy, always very messy, uh, bit of scrambled egg down his shirt, and he said, "So, um, Nat, uh, uh, c- could you just try doing it this way?" And of course, I'd rehearsed the way he was talking about.

And for those totally again, I'm familiar with this.

I definitely think of John Barton's playing Shakespeare series with the RSC is an inspiration to this that, you know, you can really see up close and in real time.

How do how does a group of artists figure this play out? And of course, one of our underlying questions is, how do you act this? You know, we can talk about theory and history, but ultimately, what are actable ideas? What's going on in the scene between characters? What do we actually know based on what the characters say, not what we think is being said or based on productions we've seen? So it's yielded just such wonderful, wonderful discussion.

And I'm sure we'll have more of that over this few week series here.