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 30s and 40s, 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 goodnatured, 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 malefemale point of view, he says lets 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 wont 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 wont 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 norths 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 shakespeares mastery charlie genius. Kenneth yeah, allows you by the end when he loses her and convey convey and when he can either in Lady Macbeths 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 cant 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. Isnt 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 malcolms feet. He has the forest moved it, you werent 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 shakespeares 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 ones 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 im 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 im 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 allconsuming 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 shakespeares 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