24. Freddie Fox on Performing Hamlet

Award-winning actor, Freddie Fox, speaks to Anjna about performing Hamlet, a last-minute Romeo, his love of poetry, and his dream of one day playing romantic hero, Benedick. Please note that Freddie uses an expletive (sh**) on one occasion.

Transcript

Anjna (00:00):

Welcome to Shakespeare Alive, a podcast from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Hello. Welcome to Shakespeare Alive. My name's Anjna, and we're joined in this episode by actor, Freddie Fox, whose work includes the popular television series (multiple): Year of the Rabbit, Cucumber, Parade's End, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Pursuit of Love. He played notorious murderer, Jeremy Bamber, in the award-winning series White House Farm, in 2020; and on the big screen, he's played Louis the 13th in The Three Musketeers, president of The Riot Club, in the film adaptation of Laura Wade's play Posh.  And he can be seen in blockbusters King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and the 2015 film, Victor Frankenstein, and in 2022's Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris -  and this is by no means an exhaustive list. Freddie took to the other side of the camera for his directorial debut in 2018, with his short film Hero, which he co-wrote and produced, for which he won the Directorial Discovery Award grand prize at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

(01:09):

So hailing from what I suspect might be Britain's most beloved theatrical family, Freddie is a remarkably gifted stage performer. He's played all over the country in musicals, as well as drama from Shakespeare to Stoppard. His award-winning performance as Romeo at the Sheffield Crucible in 2015, helped a great deal when he found himself, at very short notice, replacing two injured Romeos, in Kenneth Branagh's 2016 production. And most recently, Freddie starred as the Prince of Denmark, in Tom Littler's 2022 staging of Hamlet, for the Guildford Shakespeare Company. Hello, Freddie. It is wonderful to have you on Shakespeare Alive. Thank you so much for joining us.

Freddie Fox (01:48):

Thank you for having me. I'm very, very grateful.

Anjna (01:51):

What was your route to Shakespeare, Freddie?

Freddie Fox (01:54):

Well, my route to Shakespeare... I mean, of course for most young people in England, it comes through school, and you learn the plays, and you read some of the plays, and you do some sort of elementary study on them. So I suppose that's where I started reading them, but it wasn't really my route to Shakespeare. My route to Shakespeare was slightly more off the beaten track, and a bit more organic than that, and less forced. Because I come from a family of actors, and my dad has played so many parts, and so has my mother, but my dad particularly has this extraordinarily retentive memory. Even now he's got a sponge of a mind for words. And he would religiously really, just speak out sections and speeches of Shakespeare that fitted whatever moment he was doing, whether it be doing a bit of gardening, and talking about the plants, and goes into the good Duke's speech from As You Like It in the woods, or whether he's railing against some mad politician, then he starts to quote bits of Polonius, or whatever. That was where the poetry began to meet real life.

(03:17):

And it was quite annoying sometimes. I would just go, "Oh, can you just not talk in Shakespeare? Can you just answer me please?" And I still do that now. But it was nonetheless there in the cosmos all around me. And so the school bit happened, and it was dry and a bit dull, and I didn't really pay a great deal of attention to it then. But when it came to being offered to play Romeo the first time I did it, a lot of the speeches, and a lot of the play, was already in me from those early days with Dad, and I went, "Oh, this is extraordinary."

(03:54):

And I went off on a trip to Verona with my agent. We went on a holiday. And my agent brought loads of essays for me to read about the play, and gave me a complete works... Not a complete works, a book of the sonnets. And we just sat by the pool and were just going through all of this stuff. And I started writing my own very bad sonnets. And then I went, "Oh, it's all linking back to those early days around the kitchen table with Dad." And now it starts to become a true passion for me, so that really was my route into Shakespeare.

Anjna (04:32):

What a wonderful route to Shakespeare, Freddie. I love your phrase, "It's part of the cosmos," for you. That's extraordinary. And when you came to Romeo, was that at the Sheffield Crucible where you played Romeo first, and what age were you?

Freddie Fox (04:46):

I think I was 25 or 24. 25, I think maybe.

Anjna (04:50):

And what was the experience of playing Romeo actually like? I mean, the way he spoke and the way you performed him, and then embodied him the first time around, was it what you were expecting, or was there something in the language or the play that was maybe a little surprising or unexpected?

Freddie Fox (05:08):

I mean, less so with Hamlet, because he's famously intelligent, but I was surprised by Romeo's intelligence. I think a lot of the time he's thought of as being a bit of a star-crossed but sort of dull-brained lover. And he's far, far from that. He's madly in love, and obsessive, but he's also so quick, and so fleet of foot, both in his body and in his mind. And I was quite glad that I was starting to write out my own poems in meter, because it got the intelligence of the grammatical structure into my body before I started performing it.

Anjna (05:57):

I can imagine. And do you write now as well? Do you continue to write?

Freddie Fox (06:04):

I do. I have phases of being very loquacious with my poems, and suddenly they'll  tumble out in a torrent of about a week or two weeks, and then I won't write any for two years. I'm currently in the doldrums. I haven't written any for a while.

Anjna (06:25):

What's your poetic style? Are you a form person, or are you more of a rhythm, language... I mean, is there a category that it falls into?

Freddie Fox (06:35):

I suppose I'm slightly sentimental, and I like rhyme, and I like rhyme within lines and things. I like the poems of E.E. Cummings. I like the bucolic poets, English poets that write about the English countryside. So those are the things I like to write about, which is really cliched, and I'm not very good, but it gives me pleasure, and I write a lot about where I'm from, which is Dorset. And I write a lot about my relationship with my father and my parents, and I suppose trying to encapsulate the way I feel about the world within little poems, and that allows me to meditate on where I am in my life at this particular point.

(07:29):

And also being an amateur, you don't have any pressure of having to publish anything. I'm never going to be good, so I'll just continue to write. It's like me taking photographs. I love taking photographs. I have been obsessive about it for years. I'm shooting on film, and going to places in the world that I just really want to remember. And I go, "Oh, now I know where I am in my life at the moment. I think I know." So it's like therapy in a way.

Anjna (07:56):

I can imagine. And then obviously it becomes a record, doesn't it, for you to reflect on years after, if you want to do that as well. Wow.

Freddie Fox (08:03):

And I hate journaling. I can't do that, so it's my form of journaling.

Anjna (08:09):

You played Romeo at the Sheffield Crucible, and I know that you were asked to step in as Romeo as well, for Kenneth Branagh's production of Romeo and Juliet. So can you tell us the story there?

Freddie Fox (08:22):

The story there is I'd finished doing the Sheffield Crucible production about a year and a bit earlier. I'd wanted to play Romeo with one of my dear friends, Lily James. We talked about doing it in Sheffield together, and then she got some massive film, and I was left Juliet-less. And then thanks to Daniel Evans, and our lovely director, Jonathan Humphreys, they met Morfydd Clark, who then ended up being the most amazing Juliet. So then we did that. And then I put it to bed. And I was in Dorset with my family, and I was in our local town, where I never get any phone signal, and my phone went off in my pocket. And I thought, "[inaudible 00:09:10] could that be," and it was my agent, and she said Lily said that both Romeos had gone down, do I still remember the lines, and if I do, would I allow her to call Ken Branagh and say, "Look, we've solved the problem."

(09:28):

So you don't have to go dark for weeks or whatever it is, or come up with Ken Branagh having to go on himself and read it off a script or whatever. And Lily, of course, there was a kind of joyous delight between the two of us, that this dream we'd had since we were at drama school together, might actually come to pass. And so we both got very, very, very excited, and I went back home, and fortunately coming from an acting household, there was a copy of the play at home. So I looked through the play, and I was like, "Oh, God. Surely I can't remember this a year later?" But lo and behold, I started reading and I was like, "It's all there. I mean, more or less." And so I then drove to London, and went to Lily's flat, and she was ill or something, and had to have loads of hot water bottles, or be in a hot bath.

(10:16):

That's right. She was in a hot bath, because she wasn't feeling well. And so I was lying on my back in the bathroom, and she was in the bath, and we were pretending to do the balcony scene over the lip of the bath together. So it was about 48 hours after I got that phone call, I was on stage, and I had 24 hours of intensive rehearsals, mainly to do the fights and the blocking. And I remember just being so excited about it. I wasn't really even that nervous. I was just really excited that actually I got to get to do this show with Lil. And I remember doing a particular... It's a very complicated blocking around the ballroom sequence, where they do the sonnet, then they kiss for the first time, and Rob Ashford, who was the assistant director on it, and he came from a... Obviously he's a musical theater legend, and so it was all unbelievably choreographed.

(11:06):

The light would go here, and then a light, and then Derek Jacobi would pass there, and you got to go through here. It was like a hall of mirrors. But I managed to do it in rehearsal, and I got to the front of the stage, and Lil and I did the speech, and we circled around each other, and we kissed, and I was like, "Yes, we got it." And Rob went, "Stop. No, no, no, no, no." And I was like, "Oh no, what have I done?" And he went, "You kissed a foot off centre," and I died inside. I was like, "You're joking. I've done all of this and I..." Anyway.

(11:35):

So we rehearsed it all again, and I suppose that the thrill of walking out onto stage with all that pressure, and the audience knowing what had happened, and they were excited, because everything could have gone wrong. I was excited because everything could go right, and I was with Lil. And then I remember just walking out on stage, looking at her, heart going like this, and we both just smiled at each other as we were coming towards each other, because it was so like the first time we did the last five years, whatever how many, eight years before. And it was like, "Oh, my God. What a moment. What an experience." And it was very special.

Anjna (12:22):

And of course, I did see you play Hamlet with the Guildford Shakespeare Company.

Freddie Fox (12:25):

I mean, that was fortunate. I had a bit more time to think about it than Romeo, but again, it was just circling in the ether from when I was a kid. It's Dad's favourite play. He's done it three times. He knows every word of every part more or less.

Anjna (12:47):

And your dad, he did the voice of the ghost in this production as well?

Freddie Fox (12:48):

Yeah. Tom, our director, said, "I think I want the ghost to be a voice. I don't want him to be a physical person." And that chimed with my feelings about it, because I didn't really go in planning anything to do with this Hamlet, or to make my Hamlet different per se, but I did know that I wanted the audience always to be asking the question about his mania, or his madness, and going, "Has he lost grip on reality, or is he the most lucid person I've ever seen under the most extraordinary and difficult circumstances?" So I wanted him to be going from one moment into being like a 12-year-old with his mom, to being a despot king himself, within the space of a sentence or two. And so I thought it would help very much to have the ghost as a disembodied ghost, not least because the space offers so much in that respect, being in a church, and the voice of spirits being very much a part of that, literally the woodwork of the building.

(13:49):

But also, that when he sees the ghost in his mother's closet the second time, and is completely paralyzed with fear, that you as an audience are going, "Oh God, maybe he is totally mad, because there is nothing there." And so I think that lends itself really well to that, and of course it seemed a pretty obvious choice to ask Dad to do it, and Tom was very onboard with that idea, and watching him record it was incredibly moving. He's a master of his craft, but he was nonetheless nervous about doing it. He wanted it to be just right and he was great.

Anjna (14:27):

Well, he certainly was great to listen to. And of course you've performed with your father as well, because I saw you both in An Ideal Husband, where you were playing Lord Goring, and of course Edward Fox was playing your father.

Freddie Fox (14:39):

Yeah - milking it.

Anjna (14:40):

So it must have been quite a fun experience!

Freddie Fox (14:43):

We were really milking it. It is a fun experience. It's very rare to have a working relationship with your parents, and I've had a working relationship with my mom a bit, and on radio, and with my sister doing readings of things. But with Dad, maybe it's a father son thing, I really wanted that experience, and he's always been a very generous parent. Which not all actors necessarily are, and there's always ego involved, because how could it not be? You need to get up on stage and perform in front of hundreds of people. But he was always so deferential to my ideas, and would always listen, and would never impose himself on things I wanted to do. And whenever we disagreed, we'd rib each other and tease each other about it, which is very much the relationship in that play. And I remember us laughing a lot. We would laugh a lot together, and again, I'm so glad I've had that in my life.

Anjna (15:45):

We're just going to pause for a quick break. We really appreciate your support for Shakespeare Alive, and we'd love to hear from you about how you're enjoying our podcasts. So please complete our survey by visiting shakespeare.org.uk/future. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, or on your usual podcast platform. Why not join the conversation on social media by using #ShakespeareAlive? And we hope that you enjoy the rest of this episode. You're listening to Shakespeare Alive with me, Anjna, and I'm talking to actor, Freddie Fox. One of the interesting things about your interpretation, is that Hamlet's drinking,: that Hamlet has this dependency on alcohol, which I'd not seen quite to that extent before. So can you tell us a little bit about where that came from?

Freddie Fox (16:44):

I was just sitting on the train. I worked a lot on the train, because we had these journeys into Guildford every day and back at night, and my script was just covered in notes. You would barely see the original words. And I just one day though, "Ah, what if he was an alcoholic?" It would make a lot of sense of why he's able to be such a catty bitch at the beginning of the show. His tongue is loose, and his inhibitions have totally disappeared because he's drunk. And then it would also give him a more satisfying arc, to going from this drunk person who has no control and is unable to bring anything together, to suddenly being given this amazing slap by the ghost, and go, "Oh, my God. I've got to get my shit together and give up this dependency, which I'm just fusting in."

(17:44):

And then, you see him furious, and raging, and wanting to commit murder, but ultimately being too terrified to do it. And a real fear of death, and a real fear of the afterlife and what it may hold, having seen his father fasting in fires. By the end of the play, having come to terms with the probability of his own death, being at peace with that, and being a calm, centered man, who Fortinbras quite rightly says would have been a wonderful ruler if he'd lived. And I thought, "Well, let's take it to those extremes. That's the arc." The boy who can't literally stand up, because he's so drunk, to the man who is so grounded, and ready to receive his death as and when it comes, and deliver some of the most beautiful lines ever written about. "If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it would be not now, yet it will come."

Anjna (18:46):

The readiness is all.

Freddie Fox (18:46):

The readiness is all. Exactly.

Anjna (18:48):

Did you have a sense when you are performing it, of how much time passes? How long is Hamlet away in England? Are we talking years? Are we talking days? Are we talking months? And did that help you with this transformation?

Freddie Fox (19:02):

It's a really good question, and something Tom and I talked about, that being the moment where he shifts. When he comes back he's a different person. Obviously Shakespeare does that wonderful thing where he compresses time effortlessly, but I think in reality it must have been a couple of weeks, or maybe a month. So when he lands and sees Fortinbras's army, he goes, "Now is the time. If I'm not going to do this now, I'm worth nothing." So I think probably enough time has to pass, both where he is almost killed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and is able to dispatch them, then is almost killed by these pirates, and is able to become close to them, really confront death, and how close... in a sliding door sense... how close he was to coming that way, and then going, "It doesn't matter when it comes. I'm ready for it." So whether it be two weeks or a month, I can't really remember, but something like that.

Anjna (19:59):

I mean, you've played a murderer before on television, but did any of that, the mindset of actually taking another person's life, occur to you when you were playing Hamlet?

Freddie Fox (20:12):

Tom and I talked about it a lot. He's a person able to murder people and he's often very entitled. Let's not forget, he's a prince. And I wanted that. I was like, "I don't want him..." I mean, yes, he speaks for all men, but he is not a normal person, in the way that the people in succession are not normal people. You think differently and see the world differently on the basis of your different state of privilege. And so I think when you've been raised that way, and you know what you want, nothing necessarily needs to get in the way of that. Added to which, Shakespeare knows that the audience are going to be on Hamlet's side, and so a murder of Polonius is not like Jeremy Bamber murdering a child. It's different. It works structurally in a more forgiving way, than the realities of a murder.

(21:07):

He needs to kill this guy for the sake of the story, and you have to find out a way that becomes acceptable. Shakespeare helps you by the fact that Polonius is a nosy, irritating spymaster, and that actually he had it coming. But added to which, Hamlet, in that point, is so sympathetic to the audience, because his father has been murdered, and he has been wronged so horribly. However, he is also dealing and grappling with the notion of death from the minute he comes on the stage, seeing his father's coffin in our production, seeing the ghost of his father and burning in the afterlife. Suddenly death is not just an abstract idea that feels a long way away, and something that feels egregious to even think about, and frightened to be thinking about, and certainly to inflict it on anyone else.

(21:54):

In fact, your dad is saying, "I'm burning in hell from a sin committed by your uncle." Death suddenly is right there. So when Polonius does whatever he does, and Hamlet does what he does, death is all around him at that point. It's not like, "Oh, my God. I killed someone." It's like, "I'm falling. I'm falling into death anyway." So he's [inaudible 00:22:15] taking people with him. I don't think he sees it in the way of an empath at that point. [inaudible 00:22:23] there is empathy there. He does weep for what he's done. He does go, "Oh, my God." But then too much is happening to him, for him to really go... You don't go into a state of terrible grief. "Oh God, what do I do?" You go, "This, this, this, this, this," and that's what he does. And then he sees the skull of someone he knew and loved, and for a moment it becomes so sweet, and so sad, and so longing, and so evocative of his childhood.

(22:55):

And I've had many Yoricks in my life who have died, and you become very emotional about it, and then you remember something silly they did and you laugh, and then the world keeps moving. And by that point, the plot is pulling him at 1,000 miles an hour. You don't have time, he doesn't have time, the audience don't want him to have time, to indulge. You move on. And that is a great metaphor for his state in the play at that point. He's moving forward into another realm, a realm of being at ease with death, and then ultimately the realm of death itself.

Anjna (23:31):

Can you tell us a little bit about performing in the church, and performing with the Guildford Shakespeare Company?

Freddie Fox (23:37):

They're brilliant, the Guildford Shakespeare. I have such admiration for them. When Tom Littler said, "I do this. I sometimes work with this company, and we'd work in this church, and I thought Hamlet in a church." And I was like, "I'm in." I've seen Hamlet so many times, and often been very bored by Hamlet in a black box theater, where it doesn't have a spiritual feeling to it. And it's a very spiritual play about grief and the afterlife and death. And I was like, "That is the place to do it if you're going to do it." It was hard in the church. It was really hard acoustically, and especially when I hadn't been on stage for three years. Vocally, it was like, "Whoa. Wake up." But it was worth it for the experience of doing it in that venue.

Anjna (24:20):

Is there a particular play, or is there a character that you want to perform?

Freddie Fox (24:26):

I mean, I'd love to play Benedick. Actually, I've got it right next to me. I'm going to read it again. Again, it has a wonderful relationship at the centre of it, which is both funny and sparring, and also very beautiful and moving. And I think that would suit me, my natural kind of inclination as an actor and as a person is, as I say, trying to find the funny and the naughty and the playful. And I think he is all of those things. I think it's a wonderful play. And I still remember, I saw it Salisbury Playhouse, or somewhere like that, ages ago, and I remember loving the Benedick then, and I could only have been about 10 or 12. But I thought, "Oh, he's funny."

(25:06):

I'd love to play Henry the fifth... I'd like to do a lot of Shakespeare. I'd love to. I think it suits me, and I like making it not difficult to understand. I hear a lot of actors go, "Oh, it's just too difficult." And I'm like, "It isn't." And I get worried about it. I go, "Oh God, it's going to be really hard." And it is hard. Yes, it is. It is. But it's a worthy fight. You read the play and you go, "Oh, this isn't as hard as I thought. This is just going to be a great challenge." And the sooner I get it in my body, in my mouth, I can start to play with it, and open it up, and then an audience won't find it difficult to understand, and hopefully then some people in that audience will go, "Oh, that meant something to me."

(25:57):

And I think there's so much easily available entertainment on TV particularly, that I think I want to try and do stuff that's a little bit more, I don't know, a bit trickier, but just make you feel like you've gone a distance, and it was worth it at the end of it. It teaches you something. I mean the words in the good Duke's speech in As You Like It, I can listen to Dad say that again and again, and it's so true, about where we are in the world now, let alone 500 years ago. And what we are missing about our observance of nature, and the way that the natural world moves and changes around us, and how in need of us it is now. It's as true now, more true now, than it was when he wrote it, and I just think that's the stuff worth grappling with.

Anjna (26:47):

I mean, do you imagine doing these things in theatres rather than to a camera?

Freddie Fox (26:54):

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's great to see a good Shakespeare on the screen, sometimes there have been some good ones. It's not meant to be there. It's meant to be on stage. It's always at its best on stage, because he's constantly talking to the audience, literally talking right to them. And you can look down a camera, but you know a million people are seeing this. You want to feel like you're the only person he's talking to at that moment. It's meant to be in the theatre, and that's what I want to do. And it's where it's hardest, and so consequently where it's most worth doing it.

Anjna (27:27):

When we think about Shakespeare now, what do you think his value is to us and to the next generation?

Freddie Fox (27:36):

He's of limitless value. I think probably the gift he's given this nation and the world, I can't think really of any single one individual that's probably given something that is more innately good. I mean, there are extraordinary inventions that people have come up with, like the internet, or chemotherapy, or whatever, but all those things, extraordinary and life changing, and wonderful that they are, have a dark side to them as well. They have pain. They have anxiety. They have just simply a darker edge. There is no shadow side to the works of Shakespeare, and they tell you so much about the world we live in, and the world we're going to live in. If we pay more attention to him... I'd love to think that the generations, as we go on, pay more attention to his wisdom, because they will in turn become wiser.

(28:33):

And I'm on a journey with it myself, and I'm still quite near the beginning. I should be further along really, but anyway, I'm on it, and I'm really happy to be on it. And as I say, he addresses every subject you can imagine, and writes the best poetry about it, to help one understand it, whether it be the works of despots, like Vladimir Putin, or the interpersonal difficulties of couples, like in Much Ado, or dealing with people you don't understand, like Jeremy Bamber. That happened, and it does with the Iago. Or dealing with our relationship to the natural world, which is in all of his plays, but certainly in As You Like It and Cymbeline. It's all there.

(29:20):

And so I think further generations will always take from it if they're interested, and they will always be there, and they should rightly be lorded as one of the great treasures of the human world. And bad productions... of which there are many... aside, that's okay. We should all be trying to find a way into them. And sometimes you'll sit down in front of Mark Rylance doing Twelfth Night, and cry with laughter, and think, "Oh, this play could have been written 10 years ago," and go, "Oh, my God. It's that good." And then it makes five difficult boring productions worth it, going back to the next one.

Anjna (30:03):

What would you say we should be collecting, or what would you deposit in that collection, if it could be anything in the world?

Freddie Fox (30:09):

Oh, wow. I mean, I think obviously... And you do it. I mean, looking at your museum online, your children's voices about what even just the basic archetypes of the stories mean to them, is really powerful, because you see it being inculcated into young minds, and being able to help them frame their own views on the world they live in. And that's beautiful, because there's no better templates than these Shakespearean stories to start grappling with the bigger questions of life. But I think as a photographer, and someone who loves the English countryside, and someone who loves Shakespeare's writing about the poetry of the English countryside, I think a volume of photographs, and people in those photographs, in the environments that he's writing about, whether it be the woods of Midsummer Night's Dream, or, "Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything."

(31:13):

Whatever that is, I'd love to see that book in the running brook, of a river and stream in Warwickshire, with an actor, or with a young child sitting looking at it. Or just something about the places of Shakespeare in England. I mean, he wrote so extensively about the world, having never probably seen any of it, but having heard about it. That's wonderful. But he knew England, like Dickens knew London. I'd love to see a book of pictures with people in them in those places.

Anjna (31:43):

Well, one day maybe we can make that happen. When you were looking at the stuff in our museum, Freddie, was there anything that stood out to you? Was there anything that you thought, "Oh, I really like that?"

Freddie Fox (31:54):

I mean, God, lots. You've got a collection of things that might have been in his house into the interior design furnishings. I mean, I'm an antique furniture whore myself, so I mean, I love looking at all those things. Just as a point of view of personal pleasure. The same with your Victorian costume designs, using Elizabethan means, and how that has been modernized and come into our age. But I think probably the thing that meant the most to me, there was one about dealing with anxiety, and there's a quote from the Tempest, I think, about, "Be still my beating mind," or something like that, and about how the words of Shakespeare, and the words of other poets that have been inspired by Shakespeare, can help you deal with the anxiety of everyday life, and help young people deal with the anxiety of everyday life, which in this age of technology, technology, technology, distraction, distraction, distraction, I thought that was really great.

Anjna (33:00):

That's a really lovely way of putting it, Freddie. Thank you so much. This was such a fantastic conversation, and it's been such a pleasure to have you on Shakespeare Alive.

Freddie Fox (33:08):

Thank you so much for having me. It means so much that you asked me to come on, and I'm just very grateful to have this time to talk.

Anjna (33:16):

Thank you for joining us on our fourth outing of Shakespeare Alive. If you've enjoyed this series, please head over to our survey and leave us some comments and feedback. We'd really appreciate it. Thank you once again and farewell.