Adrian Noble

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2000

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is Adrian Noble. Now the Artistic Director of The Royal Shakespeare Company, he says he learnt a lot about theatre from watching his father, an undertaker, conduct funeral services. He fell in love with the stage when, as a boy, he saw Laurence Olivier play Othello. A stage play, he says, whether Shakespeare or Chekhov, should not simply be good entertainment, but make people ponder on life itself. In conversation with Sue Lawley, he talks about his life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Mir Ist So Wunderbar by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The Art of Memory by Frances A Yates Luxury: Wine

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a theatre director. For most of his career he's worked for one company, the
0:35.6	RSC, which he calls the finest classical theatre company in the English-speaking world.
0:41.1	The son of an undertaker, a very theatrical profession, he says, he was only 30
0:45.0	when he joined after working at the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Exchange in
0:48.6	Manchester. His outstanding productions of plays such as a Doll's house, King Lear and the master builder,
0:55.0	his decision to take the company on a rolling tour of the provinces for six months of the year,
0:59.4	and his popularising of its repertoire have meant that his time with it has been both energetic and
1:04.8	controversial. He believes passionately that the theatre is a force for the good.
1:09.1	It makes better citizens, he says. He is the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company
1:14.3	Adrian Noble. How does it do that Adrian how does it make us better citizens the
1:18.8	theatre? I've always found it fascinating that in the ancient Greek society theatre going wasn't just regarded
1:25.6	as a pastime but it was actually regarded as a duty of a citizen to go to the theatre and I've
1:31.9	often asked myself why is that's the case. I think the
1:35.2	answer to that is that the theatre poses moral choices and I think it equips the audience to address those moral choices and to make up its own
1:47.8	mind and that seems to be the centre of democracy.
1:50.8	You said that you put on a production of Henry the fifth in the early 80s because the nation had dropped its moral knickers over the Falklands.
1:58.0	That's part of what you're saying, is it, but explain it.
2:00.0	Well, I was born in 1950, and so for my generation, we'd never directly witnessed our nation going to war.
2:08.0	And I observed during the Falklands, a number of rather curious things going on.
2:14.0	War was not only horrific, but there was a side to war that was attractive to many people.
	...

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