Judy Finnegan: Good grief! |
ZW: Yes! |
JF: That must be
hard to learn. |
ZW: It was, it was very hard to learn. |
Richard Madeley:
And the timing - |
ZW: And the timing. |
[...] |
RM: The machine-gun delivery... Must be a
nightmare to get right live every night. |
[...] |
ZW: It's fast, it's very fast. |
RM: You must be
knackered at the end of every performance! |
ZW: We are, we
are. It is a marathon. |
JF: And it's
still set - your play is still set - back in 1939... |
ZW: We're setting it in 1939. We're setting it
as a monochrome, so it's an homage to the film, really.
But it's also a mixture of the play The Front Page. So
John Guare, who wrote it - adapted it - put the two plays - the
two shows - together and has come up with this. |
RM: Well, I can't
wait to see it. I'm going to come along and see it. |
ZW: It's great
fun, I have to say. It's great. We have a ball every
night. |
RM: Well, I must
say, the film, as a young boy, was one of the many influences
that inspired me to go into newspapers, to be a newspaper
journalist, because it was just so romanticized. |
ZW: Romanticized, but it was also vicious in those
days... |
JF: It still is! |
ZW: Yes. |
RM: It's still as
cutthroat as ever. |
ZW: Yes,
yes. |
RM: We quite like sort of
strange stuff on this show - in fact, we're looking for 'road
ghosts' on Monday - and I read something in the paper about your
late father, Sam Wanamaker, who, of course, was single-handedly
responsible for the re-building of The Globe Theatre. And
it said - and I understand this might be a traveller's tale - it
said that ancient records, or medieval records, had been
recently discovered [for] the very area in which The Globe's
been re-built, where it shows that a man called Sam Wanamaker
used to live there in Shakespeare's time. |
ZW: [Correcting him] Samuel
Wanamaker. |
RM: Is it true? |
ZW: It is true. |
RM: Is it really? |
JF: Is that true? |
ZW: Yes, it is
true. |
RM: Isn't that
strange! |
ZW: I know, I know. It's
very extraordinary. |
JF: Did your
father know about that, before he got so involved? |
ZW: No, no, he
didn't. What is interesting, though, is that 'Wanamaker'
is a Dutch name, and it wasn't my father's real name. So
it was given to him, or he took it on, when he was in Chicago
and decided to... I mean, when they came over on the boats
from Russia - the Jewish immigrants, fleeing from
Russia... And I think that their - I don't know what their
Russian name was, I've forgotten it... |
RM: Pretty
spooky, though! |
ZW: Yes.
It's wonderful, it's wonderful. |
RM: Yeah, it is. |
JF: Zoë, it's always lovely to
talk to you. Where's the play on at? What's the
theatre? |
ZW: It's the National Theatre - the Olivier.
And it stars Alex Jennings and various other people, and it's a
wonderfully funny evening. |
RM: Oh, it looks great! [To Zoë]
And the other spooky thing is, you and I were born on the same
day, we've just discovered. And you go to the same school
as our children [his and Judy's] - well, you used to go
to the same school!
[They all laugh] |
ZW: I know, it's great.
It's a good school. |
RM: Great school. |
ZW: Yeah. |
RM: OK. Nice to see you again. |
ZW: Thank you. |
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