Good afternoon. Welcome back to midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary eichten. Glad you could join us. Well, let's start this hour with a few questions. Here's one. Why do we go to plays? What is the purpose of theater movies? Are they better than live theater is the theater dying?One of the leading theatrical figures of our time was in the Twin Cities this week to answer those questions. Sir. Peter Hall is the creator of the royal Shakespeare company and he spoke Monday at the Guthrie theaters annual Global voices Forum on Art and life. They were going to hear from Sir Peter Hall. It's a great pleasure to be here. I am ashamed to say that it says I was lost here in 1968. When I saw the house of atreus Guthrie's great production. I was an enormous fan of Guthrie's. And as I said today, I feel I owe him an enormous debt of Honor because the British Recognize their artists in the theater as you may know by knighting or daming them if they are actors, but until Tony Guthrie a director had never been knighted and I always feel he made it possible for me to be knighted because I was the next but he was a great man and what he did in establishing. This theater has been a beacon 904 the whole of North America. It's a great joy to be here. I'm going to talk about The necessary Theater which sounds rather serious and it is now I'm slightly aware and it's one of the penalties of becoming a jad' and a slight totem in one's profession. I'm very aware that I knew Samuel Beckett very well. I knew Tennessee Williams very well and that I work with them people like that and people like to talk about that sometimes and we'll talk about that if you want, but that's the second sort of Personality area and we'll do that in questions. Should you want okay? Have you noticed? What a disturbing thing theater is how much people suspect it. In my country, we bred a whole generation of Puritans to clobber it. And we made the greatest theatrical culture in history at the time of Shakespeare and 35 years later. The theaters were pulled down. The actors were sent away into vagabondage. The writers went off to France to wait on the king in Exile. And the theater tradition was dead and the Puritans breathed a great sigh of relief and said that filth is over that conflict is over stop. In fact, the metaphors of playmaking of play-acting are actually used in conversation, aren't they in an extremely pejorative sense? We'd say to somebody all stop play acting or you're being dramatic. Or your over-the-top or you're a ham. That doesn't apply to the terms of any other art at all. Not at all. But theater attracts a quite prickly feeling of worry and disturbance. It's also always dying. It's always threatened in some sense or other and it's part of its potency. I think that this conflict continues. What is it? Why is it you put a group of children in a room and they will begin to play, right? They may even begin to make theater theater the ancient Greek word means the act of seeing of seeing something better clearer theater The Children Play they tell stories to each other. They dress up. It seems to be quite natural. It happens and they become interested in Dramatics. Now playing of course is a form of education for a child a child who doesn't play will never learn to be an adult in any sense of the word. And in the same way that instinct to play is what drives us to go to the theater and to love I think storytelling It's not that we want to know. To see horrible things happen, but we need to participate if necessary in horrible things in order to understand. We also need to participate in comic things but I think theater viewed as entertainment and it certainly has to be entertaining because if it isn't you won't be sitting there but if it's merely entertainment then we go out and say well, yeah it was okay. It's okay, but I could have done without it. But when theater actually works you go out actually feeling in some sense slightly changed changed in your own attitudes changed in your thoughts wanting to discuss it wanting to worry about it. And that kind of Quasi social function of the theater has always been there from the beginning of time now I can sit down And stopped to tell you a story. As I develop the story. We can then have one or two of you acting it out. You can start to make the dialogue we can start to make plays our earliest plays though. The Greek plays was certainly social fundamentally part of the process of a city living with itself governing itself knowing how to live with itself. But they wore masks. Now, I think we're very patronizing about masks. We all seem to behave as if the Greeks the ancient Greeks Didn't Have Faces really, you know, when they grew up and got better. They took the masks off actors and there was the naked face. Let's now what is that about every primitive Society has a drama based on the mask whether it's in Japan the Far East Indians. Both in India and and the and Indians here. It's all to do with the mask. And I think it's a means of expression because although as we play out our fantasies tell our stories make our dramas make our plays. We also move into areas of experience which are horrible disturbing upsetting by turn. Old extremely Pleasant, they can be but the mask governs and gives form to the fantasy. I don't think it's possible myself to play Greek tragedy at the full level of pain without the mask the mask contains. The passion to some degree and the mask is in a sense a representation of the Greek stage itself, which as you know is an upper platform and a lower area in the lower area is the chorus who are your representatives you the audience on the upper stage are the characters and then there's usually some species of door to away and you go off the principles go off and what the Dreadful things the killing of Agamemnon and his bath Oedipus blinding himself. They happen offstage always off stage. So the stage itself is like a mask. I think one of the Supreme inventions of theater is the use of a form to allow the expression of wild mad emotions. I think in that sense Shakespeare's verse is a mask because if a philia at the end of the nunnery seen burst into tears, she suddenly finds that she has to speak. An absolutely regular 14 lines sonnet in tears. Oh, no, my mind is here o'erthrown and you can't you simply can't you can only express the form of that by having the hysteria inside you and using what you say in order to govern discipline and contain that emotion without that emotion The Mask will be dead. But with it the mask will live. I could go on about this for a long while because old drama has a strict form and all drama is in that sense mask. Like I think a great operatic Aria is a mask. I think Shakespeare's verse is a mask. I think even Ibsen and check off who suddenly Found themselves in a partly naturalistic convention right very formally they don't write naturalistically at all, and their masks was a kind of reality. until the theater arrived you didn't have sets with doors or Windows or curtains or lamps. So in Ibsen when someone lights a lamp that's a great metaphor that it lights up or they draw the curtain. It's a metaphor. That's not so to us every play. We see someone turns on the lights or the but to them it was revolutionary and that was their particular form and that conflict in theater between form and freedom wild emotion and discipline is of course where it lies. That's why you want to see it while you want to hear it why you can attend to it. Something very strange though as happened in our century. the cinema unquestionably the art form of our Century. It belongs to us. It is us. It's a whole new world and clearly as we as we March into the next millennium the world of pictures is going to get more and more overwhelming. That's done something very interesting to the theater. Because the the cinema doesn't deal in mosques in the sense that I'm trying to define the theater experience. on this stage not with that. They're probably but with what behind We don't even need what Joe's put behind there. We can have just this area on this stage a couple of actors can walk on and they can begin to act Julius Caesar and if they're good enough, you'll say fine. That's ancient Rome. There. It is. You put a camera there and you film it. Then you show it you'll say looks awfully tacky. There's nothing there. Where is Agent room the camera demands naturalism in order to abstract the naturalism and make its own metaphor its own its own. artistic expression if you like and that's why if you photograph Shakespeare you get a kind of Double Image you get a muddled because you get Something that was written for an absolutely open exchange between the living actor and the living audience. Will you play a game of Make-Believe please but we believe this is Rome and the camera is filming that and then you don't know where you are. So I think at this moment, although the theater is as usual dying. It has also been freed in the most extraordinary way when I came into the theater. If you had a scene of a dinner party. In somebody's room you had the table you handle that the tax at Round And then you had the room one wall removed so that you could peep into it all dressed that it correctly curtains ornaments everything. The lights were all masked never saw a spotlight and everyone looked at this simulation of reality. That's a kind of dead naturalism. The coming of the cinema has freed us from that. So that now if you've got a dinner party, all you need is for good actors and the table and a few chairs see all the lights. So it's it's it's much much Freer than it was 50 years ago. It's accordingly. I think much easier to do the great imaginative Classics and it's of course easier in a theater like this, which is completely non Illusionist in that sense. This is a place for imagination not simulated reality, which is quite quite different you can say if The theater is freed. Imaginatively. Why is it so threatened? Well, I'm I'm not awfully sure. It is in the sense that in my lifetime. I think good theater. Has increased what do I mean by good? I don't mean serious because it can be funny. But I mean theater that has a potency and it has some actual power in it a theater which can both contain Classics and modern modern writing that seems to me to have got stronger both in my country and to certain extend in yours. And I don't believe it will decline any further. I think it will increase long term. Why because it is live, you know, when you go to the cinema and you see a bad film. It doesn't really matter when it may be irritating probably rather funny. You can sit and laugh at it. But if you go to a bad play badly acted you are so embarrassed aren't you? There is an embarrassment factor in the theater, which does not apply to the cinema because the cinema is in that sense dead. It's already abstracted. Now, I'm not please understand me. I'm not knocking the cinema, which I think at its best can express fantasy and images with a kind of fluidity and extraordinariness, which previous ages would have hardly believed on the other hand an actor with a line of Shakespeare. create More images in 10 beats then you could possibly assimilate with ten visual images. So I think the theater still in there with it with a chance and there is that Come further down. If you want some poor people coming through the snow and there is that extraordinary sense of the living reality of it, which I think needs protecting needs guarding and these celebrating. Theater has nearly always been subsidized by somebody for the Greeks. It was the state for the elizabethans. It was the court. In Europe, the last hundred fifty years. It's been the state mean for Shakespeare to be granted the title. His troops were granted. The title of the King's Men was commercially enormously important to them enormously important to them and I must say it meant something you know, what in 1606 was given at Whitehall as the Christmas entertainment. I'll tell you. The Chamberlain must have said to Burbage and Shakespeare. Well, what have you got? What have you got for King James? And they said we've got the premiere of this great new play a bit long, but we can do it just before Christmas King Lear. That was done on December the 18th 1606 before James. I can't imagine Samuel Beckett at Buckingham Palace. Set times have clearly changed but the idea of patronage hasn't now you have a very different idea in this country to the idea. We have in mind since the war we've had subsidy. And subsidy has produced a bit of a golden age frankly in the British theater, the creation of some extraordinary works and extraordinary companies. And I think most of all we can point to the fact that Britain has got about 25 dramatists of world ranking stature has had them in the last 50 years, which is pretty extraordinary when you've had your share but you're a big country bigger than us and you're nothing like as blessed in dramatists mind you Joe will tell me that without the Irish. We'd hardly be there. And that of course is true because when you look congreve Sheridan sure Beckett, okay, see I mean it is wild fairly unbelievable. But anyway, we've done pretty well on subsidy. You have the whole tradition of patronage of private giving or corporate giving but you have tax breaks. We don't You're proud of being successful. You're proud of making money. We're not we keep very very quiet about it if we make money and there's an interesting fact that I discovered the other day that the amount of money. That the Metropolitan Opera costs the American people in tax. They don't get is almost exactly the same as the amount of money that Kant Garden gets in subsidy. So whether you call it subsidy or tax breaks if it comes to pretty much the same thing now because the next thing is people say Well, why should the theater be subsidized? I mean if it's not making money, it's not necessary. It's not right. Why should it? I had a wonderful conversation some years back. With Dennis stature that the husband of mrs. Thatcher and he said to me look here in the National Theater, why is it need all this money? And I said, well we're doing a social job and he said well, then you can't be doing the right players and I said what we are because we play to about 85 90 % business we have to and he said well you're paying the actors too much. And I said, but we're not they get about a fifth of their commercial rate because they believe in and he said well, you're not charging enough for the tickets and I finally had to say because it was like a dialogue between two people from separate planets. You know, I had to say if you believe that the theater has a social purpose in the widest sense and you have to realize a few things about it. First of all, you cannot have theaters that are too big Because you can't make actors any bigger. I mean over a thousand seats the theater experience ceases to exist, right? You can't charge elitist prices because if you do you have an elitist audience and an elitist audience is a bad audience. I mean I and audience which is just young or just working class whatever that is or just Catholic or just communist or just upper class is a bad audience a good audience in our world is something which is truly a representation of the whole of society in some sense. So you need cheapish prices. Yeah. then then you you have to have a situation where you do what you believe you should do for artistic reasons rather than for commercial reasons. This is the hardest thing of all to defend that it's the hardest thing for people to understand because all governments think that he who pays the piper ought to be able to call the tune and in the theater he can't and shouldn't and shan't because What our writers are saying to us? Our new writers is what we want to hear and the classics that we do have to speak to us as immediately as the new players. Otherwise, they're not worth doing it may be worth reading but they're not worth seeing and it's this sense of community which is bred out of a properly supported theater. I think that makes a theater live and accompany live There's been another Revolution apart from the cinema in the whole theater conundrum. And that is the fact that we now don't really depend entirely on what the audience thinks. We distort it. It's that word called marketing. Now marketing is the result of a society where we're all too busy. There are too many too many things taking our time and we want to look in the paper and say how many stars did he give that three? I'll go to that one start now won't go to that. I mean, who is this guy? This this is this is a really crucially important Point Shakespeare had to put up with Puritans and the plague but he didn't have critics. Now I've nothing against critics. I think when you think of the amount of bad theater, they have to see I have a certain amount of sympathy for them. But what I do worry about is that the reason why a community of people want to go and see a play is very complex and is bread really out of interrelation and what we call the word of mouth. It's not out born out of marketing or advertising shouldn't be in my view or critics as such because it distorts the dialogue in a in a really very very peculiar way the word of mouth. Is absolutely vibrant and it gets you now into a position where you know Broadway producers will say to me do you think you could have X in this play now X is a big movie star who's probably never been on the stage. And you say well, I don't know and they said well, she's not quite right, but maybe there's a way I mean we'd get such an advance. Now that is not the way to do a play and of course if Miss X turns out to be wonderful then the word of mouth will operate and everyone will come see it but if as is most likely she will not be wonderful. Everyone will say what on Earth did you do that for so that essential dialogue between the act on the stage and the people in the audience? I don't think should be distorted and I think is quite seriously distorted. So we've got to guard against that and we got to worry about it. So what is my dream? Why I like I've like coming here and why I remember being very excited about the presence of this theater was years ago when Tony gray 3 dreamt it up. Is it is genuinely obviously part of this community. They can't say that about most Broadway theaters can't say that about most West End Theatres their shops in which some goods are displayed. Sometimes. Well sometimes badly, but the sense of a theater being part of its community and servicing its Community is absolutely critical. I think to why theater should be there at all and that's what you you have here. What do I mean servicing the community? Well, I mean that children shall come to it and that children shall understand plays and that adults play and that playing is part of being an adult as well as part of being a child. I mean that social concerns should be debated by the act of going to the theater the precious and fascinating thing about theater at this moment in our history is it it's about the only live reason why we all gather together and have an emotional experience together which actually enriches us collectively Paradox. If I gave you say Ulysses great speech from troilus and Cressida and I just selected two or three of you and said read that now tell us what it said. However intelligent you are I bet you couldn't do it, but an actor who understands the speech can say it to all of you and you will understand it because the act of play-acting of making it of actually Taking those words through an actor's imagination makes all of you sharper more intelligent than you actually are individually. And that is the reason why we have to act Shakespeare because we can still understand him. Horrible thought in 200 years. They probably won't. Won't affect that. Thank God. But it's gradually going it's gradually becoming more and more difficult for people to understand but it's still in the white heat of acting something that can be understood and appreciated. I don't think that if we have this community theater judiciously subsidized well-managed serving its community. That it should do only classics. Because I really suspect the term classic. Anyway, what is a classic something you have to do at school? I think there is no point in doing a play unless it speaks to the audience that you're performing it to now this may be because of some actual happening. You know, I have just about to do measure for measure which is about a man in power exercising his power for sexual purposes. Everybody is running me up from the press and said, oh I suppose you're doing this and I said, no, I'm not honestly I'm not but I mean clearly that has an edge today which he didn't have yesterday and it won't have tomorrow. Not the reason for doing it but players come and go like that and I think one's duty in doing a classic is to find out as much as you can about it. So that you can express what you think it offers an audience now in this place at this particular time. And that of course means that we're dealing with about five seven hundred players not more not more but they're very rich. And the sense of History which most of us lack now and the sense of the past which most of us lack now. Is more easily picked up and understood in the theater than it is in the classroom. So that's another reason for a living theater another necessity to have it. I always dreamed and it was it was why I made the Royal Shakespeare company in the way that I did that if actors could play Pinter and Shakespeare Beckett and Webster. They would be onto something because the to illuminate each other and of course they do it's not just technical. It's spiritual. It's metaphysical and you do get this sudden feeling that When Shakespeare's writing parts of Lea that he'd read Beckett. I mean there are those paradoxes which come up as you survey the world's Repertory. But those are the things that a serious theater can Embrace and express so I don't have any doubt that giving resources for the act of theater. Is as important and as socially Justified as giving resources for education or even for the drains and it's absolutely part of our living I think and should be looked at as such and regarded as such so that's the need for subsidy the other need if the theater is to really be what it ought to be is the need for a company now. I don't know what it's like here now, but certainly. In Britain, we've had to endure a great deal of mockery from the media about love is or wanting to band together and the actors will want to stay as one tight little group, but historically it remains true that every interesting Progressive March in the history of theater. Whether it be Moliere or Shakespeare or the Abbey or the bill in our sample or the Moscow Art Theater let alone what's happened in my country in the last 50 70 years. It's always been through a company a company that more or less stays together. I say more or less because the moment you say to an actor you've got to swear that you are a member of my company forever and ever and you will never go to Hollywood. They immediately go to Hollywood they swear first, but then they go to Hollywood. The only way you can actually keep a company is by letting people go away and they come back. True Paradox, but if you have a company that a number of things happen, you save an enormous amount of time people's work rhythms relate to each other. You know, how you dislike each other as much as how you like each other so time is saved work. Work working practices get sharper you support each other because there's one very interesting thing about the theater. Which does not apply to the other Performing Arts you need to support each other if if the messenger comes on in Macbeth and says, he's one line the queen my Lord is dead wrongly Macbeth cannot possibly play. She should have died Hereafter. I just saw it. I mean, this is a classic moment of actor dependency. I just saw it whether the young actor playing the messenger was having his moment and he said the queen my Lord is dead. Paul's Macbeth said she should have died Hereafter. Laughs promise you because because of what the messenger done. This is a classic Shakespearean half line the queen my Lord is dead. Right should we said so slowly and so tentatively walking on eggshells that Macbeth can come in on the Queue because that's how it's written the queen. My Lord is dead. She should have died Hereafter pause. That's how it's written. So that's a digression. But but it illustrates what I mean that Macbeth needs a good messenger and a good company of actors is entirely dependent on each other and when they're working well like a weld honed musical Ensemble, they are extraordinary. It never ceases to amaze me that a good production will vary by 10 15 20 seconds per night in time. That's amazing. Isn't it? A bad production? Will sometimes be 10 minutes longer 20 minutes shorter. I mean it's all over the place but a good production where the actors are really relating to each other helping each other creating with each other. It's steady like that and that is extraordinary. But if if you have that degree of dependence, you need a degree of permanence. You need a degree of interplay. I suppose that's how Shakespeare's company was. There were only 15 of them and they all had a share and obviously they didn't know what a play was like to they all met to read it because they only had parts so when they sat down to read it, they would say ah, oh I see. No, I understand what's happening. And there's a wonderful court case in history of one of the actors who left Shakespeare's company to join Edward aliens company taking with him. Obviously a large part of the Repertory and his head and they hadn't got the play texts for some of the things that he was in so they couldn't do them and they'd shoot him as a consequence. So when there was real dependency there like we cannot imagine but that dependency is what a company is all about and frankly if I'm honest. It's why I've spent 45 years of my life doing this job. I don't really care. Well I do care but I don't really care whether it's a success or a flop. I don't care if 10,000 people see it or a million. I don't care if it gets good notices or bad notices. Finally. I don't care whether I earned money or whether I don't finally because finally why I do it is to rehearse it because when you rehearse well with a good group of actors and accompany you achieve something where all of you are better than you knew you feel better and it is in a way a metaphor. For decent living decent Society proper politics a healthy family all those things. It's really good. Now. I'm not being sentimental about it. It has tensions. It has difficulties, it has disputes and and it has unhappiness has but it's creative its positive and that is the most extraordinary thing about working in the theater and the best way of doing that. Is it with a company that stays pretty much together and not only stays together but plays a variety of players together now because of Market forces and sensible accounting we don't have companies anymore because the actors want to be free to do other things. We don't play Repertory because you can't keep changing the sets over but the truth is were selling this theater short. By not doing that because if you have a company and you have a real Repertory the plays get better and better and better and the audience is participation and understanding of the actors gets better and better and better you miscast. Because you have the actor in the company rather than Typecast and Miss casting nine times out of 10 is richer and more lifelike because most people when you look at them for the first time, you said, oh, I know what sort of bloke that is, you usually revise that don't you within days? It sounds quite wrong about him. First appearances. Well most casting in the theater is first appearances and it should be much richer and more extraordinary than that. So all that comes out of the need for a company which I've spent my life trying to do and I still believe passionately that all those subsidy in my country is now unfashionable and although companies hardly exist. Those are the two pillars on which the theater has always been built on and those are the two things which we've got to fight to get and keep in the future because every single town in this country or in mind of any size ought to have a theater like this. Why not It makes your life's richer has to and it also I think. Is part. To put it fancifully of the democratic process. I mean we sit watching television getting more and more and more information. We watched news as if it was drama. I mean that stat rather excited voice that the Anchorman use when they say stay tuned we've got lots and lots and lots of this latest Scandal thank God, we've got a new Scandal thank God. We got a new horror. I mean, it's it's wonderful that our age is now saturated in information, but on the other hand were turning it into drama, which it isn't. I think it would be much better to be informed and come and see a little bit of aeschylus. He said it just as well. but that that use of the theater as a public debate as a place where it all happens. Is I think where it really is exciting and where it really is disturbing. I was being told at lunch how there's more and more concern about the actual programs of theaters in this country from the funding authorities. That's certainly true in my country. You can't get them to keep their fingers away. I tell you a really for me wonderful story which made me proud to be in the theater. In the mid-60s when I was running the Royal Shakespeare I put on a play called us which was directed and devised by Peter Brook. It was working with me. This was about the American involvement in Vietnam. 65 66 this was it was before you all got worried and it was at a moment when no one was really too concerned. You know, I mean it it felt right to be pushing back the the Red Menace now this this play which was rather brechtian and very ambiguous was just questioning. Whether these whether it was right to be that imperialistic whether it was right for any country to take on the role of the policeman. And it was quite hard hitting politically for that moment. At that time we still had the Lord Chamberlain. A great compliment to the theater, but the most pernicious institution invented in the 18th century because Henry Fielding had been rude about the government. And the sensor was enshrined in the Lord Chamberlain who obviously knew a great deal about players because he ran the Royal household. He had a number of people working for him which were mostly retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They cut anything which they thought was remotely suggestive. They were alert to blasphemy and paranoid about any kind of Filth particularly. If it was a less than heterosexual kind. I remember one of them saying to me about lying in a place. It'll come on hold. You know what that line means and I said, no, he said uh periscopes This is obviously some Naval term for practice that I was unaware of. anyway It's funny now, but I think I think mainly about all the hundreds of dramatists who must have sat down and looked at that sheet of paper and said no, I won't waste my time. Do you realize this idiot institution band ghosts band widowers houses band waste. I mean, it's incredible and on he went he took Lions out of Samuel Beckett. In endgame when I did it. God the bastard, he doesn't exist. I had have the letter still it is not permitted to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the Almighty. Anyway, we sent us to him with a certain amount of trepidation because it will though there was nothing remotely obscene in it. Not a trace of periscopes. It was heavily political. And I was very interested to see how he would react. Silence reigned and we rehearsed and we got to the last week of rehearsal. We still hadn't heard and you had to get a license. Otherwise, you couldn't do the play. Then I had a phone call saying would I go and see the Lord Chamberlain after-hours at Saint James's Palace because he'd like to give me a drink and have a little chat. I thought aha. And off I went and I was duly given the glass of Sherry. And we sat down and he said to me I've looked at the play. I'm really tall course, but I've looked at it and but my readers have read it all and they're rather concerned about it. And I said really what he said. Well, do you think it right? That a great Theater Company in receipt of public money should do a play criticizing our great Ally with whom we have a special relationship. And I said, yes, I do if the people doing the play Believe In what they're saying and the thing is done with conviction and integrity. He said I can't agree with you. It is outrageous that something calling itself. The Royal Shakespeare company should do a play like this and I said, aren't we talking about freedom of speech? And he said I have to tell you I should be having a word with your chairman. Now shut the door. I had a wonderful chairman. Otherwise, I wouldn't be standing here tonight. And he said to me has the man any legal reason for stopping this play. I said, no absolutely not. He said well rather proves that that's the reason we should be doing. It. Doesn't it the whole thing I said, absolutely. He said we're gon do it see what happens and we did it and I felt that that it's at that particular moment that particular point that pressure point. That's where the theater Should exist doesn't always doesn't often enough, but I remember that as a as a proud moment now. Our dramatists have to lead us in this our dramatists have to be polemical. They have to be political. We've just had a ghastly case of racial murder Stephen Lawrence what you may have read about and they're in London and there has been a play done about that using all the evidence and all the evidence of the police inquiry which has been published in a fortnight flat and it's on now. I think that's good. Television wouldn't do it. Too dangerous not bland enough, but theater can and should so it seems to me that we've got to keep these forums for the future for our children. so that we can relive the past relive the classics and so we can experience the present because we do need to know what our writers think of us. They are our only Witnesses they tell us about us and also they tell the future about us. They are our only memorials everybody's heard of Mozart, but who knows anything about Mozart's Emperor? I vote for Mozart. Thank you. Sir, Peter Hall the creator of the royal Shakespeare company. He spoke Monday at the Guthrie theaters annual Global voices Forum on Art and life. Well that does it for our midday program today. By the way, we're going to be rebroadcasting sir Peters speech had nine o'clock tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio case you missed it rebroadcast at 9 programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by the Pillsbury company Foundation caring for the community by giving kids a loving lift news headlines are coming up next and then right after the news Ray Suarez will be along with Talk of the Nation here on Minnesota Public Radio. It's Linda said oh Casper, we're off to the language doc region of France this week for some great buys and red wine. That's the Splendid Table Saturday at 2 and Sunday at 7:00 on Minnesota Public Radio K. No W FM 91.1 You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. We have a sunny Sky 33 degrees at Kinder W FM 91.1 Minneapolis. And st. Paul Sunny through the afternoon temperature about where it's going to be temperature high clear tonight with an overnight low 10 to 15 degrees and then sunny skies tomorrow with a high in the upper 30s snow emergency still in effect in Minneapolis.