that's right. 35 years in total with the rsc, the royal shakespeare company. it's coming to an end. how big a wrench is it going to be? oh, it's going to be... well, i hope not to sever my ties with the company altogether. i have one more production to do after this. next year is a big anniversary year because it's 400 years since the publication of shakespeare's folio, first folio. so i'm going to be around certainly until the end of next year, and hopefully supporting whoever it is who follows me. here's something you said a while ago that i want you to explain to me, cos it's really quite striking, almost remarkable. you said, "i suspect that i have filled that "god—shaped hole in my consciousness "with shakespeare." yeah. does that mean shakespeare is your religion? do you know, that's a quote by sartre, who said in the secular age, that most people have a god—shaped hole in their consciousness. and i recognised that i probably had filled mine with shakespeare. erm, it's certainly a better fit than the bible. ifind more wisdom, more truth in shakespeare than i do in the bibl

we did a tour to china in 2016, which was the first time the rsc had ever taken its main house shows to the people's republic. and i worried about it. i thought, here are plays about english history. i thought maybe the sense of dynastic succession might chime with them, but i worried, for instance, about how the humour would translate and how a character like falstaff would come across. and i needn't have worried, because as tony sher waddled on stage as sirjohn falstaff, i remember the very precise moment when he said... he'd just, as falstaff, delivered this whole tub of lies. and then he said, "lord, lord, how the world "is given to lying." and the audience went up, because the world is given to lying, and everybody recognises that. so, i think shakespeare's universality is not because we take him abroad, it's because he has been appropriated, whether it's by china or byjapan, by india, by germany or anywhere else in the english—speaking world, they have taken shakespeare to their hearts and adapted him and translated him and all the rest of it. so, you know, one touch of natur

nick lees, rsc, had a policy, thank you forjoining us. it isa it is a bank holiday weekend, so lots of people will be trying to do things outdoors. how is it looking? a bank holiday for many of us, you are right, and the weather playing ball. for most of us it will be dry throughout the next few days. just a few isolated showers here and there. a beautiful start to the day, this is weymouth in dorset for the last hour or so, showing the early morning sunrise. you can see the bright sky coming up from the sun, caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere. today a lot of dry weather with the odd shower around. looking at the satellite picture, most of us have these clear skies but we do have some thick cloud edging into western areas of northern ireland, and that is rain bearing cloud so you will see damp weather in western counties for a time eventually working into western scotland where at the moment we have a few mist and fog patches that are still yet to clear. for most of us a bright start to the day with morning sunshine. it is only into