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    Category Archive: Interviews

    Brendan Books, Somerset – AND BBC Radio Bristol – Thurs 11th June

    Speaking tomorrow at Brendan Books (shortlisted for the Independent Bookshop of the Year) at 7pm:

    Ben has been described at the “Jamie Oliver of Shakespeare” and will be covering facts about Shakespeare’s language, examples of how Shakespeare would have sounded in his day…

    …says the Somerset County Gazette, and indeed I will…

    Also, ahead of the talk I’ll be on Graham Torrington’s show on BBC Radio Bristol at 10am…

    Tune in and turn up, if you can…!

    Listen to my interview on BBC Radio 4′s Midweek with Libby Purves

    Click the link below to listen…

    BBC Radio 4 Midweek, With Libby Purves

    BBC Radio 4, Midweek with Libby Purves

    Last week’s Toast talk at the Notting Hill Waterstones went tremendously well, now to this week…

    Tune in tomorrow at 9am – or via the iPlayer for the following week, to hear me being interviewed on Midweek, BBC Radio 4, by Libby Purves, with international art dealer Philip Mould, the amazing sitar player Baluji Shrivastav, and the author and Times columnist Stefanie Marsh… The show will be repeated at 9.30pm…

    Listen to the clip here, or Listen Again to the full interview here

    The Book Depository Interview

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    The Book Depository

    I was asked recently to give my Top Ten favourite books, for the website The Book Depository.
    Top Ten Books for The Book Depository

    Ben Crystal is an actor at Shakespeare’s Globe. With his father David Crystal he co-authored the internationally acclaimed bestseller Shakespeare’s Words and The Shakespeare Miscellany. He is also author of Shakespeare on Toast. Here is Ben Crystal’s Tuesday Top Ten.

    Ben says:

 “I am approaching this from a Desert Island point of view, in that it is an impossible task to bring your favourite books down to a mere 10, much like that terrible equally impossible question, ‘What is your favourite film?’ How can you answer? In mentioning one you leave out twenty.

After great deliberation, ranting and raving, here are ten of my most favourite — bearing in mind, Desert Island-like, I get the complete works of Shakespeare as standard, which I realized after selecting wasn’t included in the original ten, mea culpa. All of these books I have read and re-read. There’s just something about them that keeps me going back, like Scott’s Bladerunner and Kubrick’s The Shining…”

    Neuromancer by William Gibson
    I remember picking this up for the first time when I was 15 and not having the slightest idea what was going on. Cyberpunk fiction was new to me, and Gibson’s elliptical writing keeps your imagination working hard to keep up. Neuromancer was written years ahead of the Internet we all know and love, and I keep coming back to Case’s journey through cyberspace. There are still bits I don’t entirely get, and I adore that.

    Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
    This is the first of two books I found idling through Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street in London, when I lived nearby. It’s the Harvill paperback, with a cut out cover, as if staring down the twisted barrel of gun, through to a penguin carrying a violin case. It starts with a short story:

A Militia major is driving along when he sees a militiaman standing with a penguin. “Take him to the zoo” he orders. Some time later the same major is driving along he sees the militiaman still with the same penguin. “What have you been doing?” he asks, “I said take him to the zoo.” “We’ve been to the zoo, Comrade Major,” says the militiaman. “And the circus. And now we’re going to the pictures.”

I immediately turned the page, and on a cast of characters is listed Misha, the penguin. I bought the book, and fell in love with Misha. I maintain he’s one of the most lovable fictional characters I’ve read. (After the lift that has existential dread and doesn’t like ‘going up’ – “Have you considered the possibilities that ‘down’ has to offer…?” in Life, The Universe and Everything.)

    Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
    I’m terribly partial to a nicely-presented book. Well, actually, I’m a sucker for it. I adore beautiful bindings, a leather-bound complete works of Shakespeare from the 19th Century is one of my proudest possessions. This edition of Norwegian Wood is in a gold-coloured case, and, joy of joys, the book presented in two small booklets, red and green, as I understand the original Japanese versions were. Discovering Murakami, about three years before he really hit the UK, and his dream-like, slightly terrifying stories of Japan after dark, noodles and beer, apartments playing soft Jazz through night, people (usually beautiful and esoteric girls) disappearing. I think I’d read half the book before I realised the shop was closing.

    Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan
    I’d never read anything like this, when my friend Jim (who sketched a picture of the Globe for me for Shakespeare on Toast) recommended it to me. A love-sick writer starts writing a story, decides it’s rubbish, throws it in the bin, but the story carries on writing itself, centering on a gathering and growing war in a small town, based around a freezing cold sombrero that falls out of the sky and… oh just read it! Brautigan has a lovely economy with his prose, all the more enjoyable by the way he titles his short chapters.

    Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
    Ever been in love? Ever yearned for someone so desperately and yet so silently. I sobbed like a babe at the end of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy. The love that pours out of this book, the staggering prose, every single line a masterpiece. ‘Make my happiness – and I will make yours’… Go and read this book, go and read it now! I wanted to include Great Expectations as Dickens’ prose is truly mindblowing, but Jane Eyre pulls on your heartstrings like a symphony of lost love.

    Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
    Zola did something terrifying with love here. Starting with a Dickensian description of a Parisian alleyway, you find yourself caught up in a terrible tangle of yearning for a lover’s touch. Therese and Laurent reach the peak of their love for each other so quickly, and Zola charts the falling apart of their minds and hearts in such minute detail. It’s terribly, terribly sad, and horrifically fascinating. They hurtle, ever-so-slowly, to an obvious, but no less enjoyable for it, ending.

    Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
    I found MMS in a book store a few years after he first published Only Forward. It’s a clever, and very funny piece of science fiction, with an incredibly cool central character, and skilfully avoids The Curse (so many science fiction books have great premises, but no idea how to end). One of those books I want to be in and have written at the same time. I like Michael’s later thriller writing (under the name Michael Marshall) but his MMS writing bites harder for me; his book of short stories What You Make It, nearly made it into the top ten, simply because they still haunt me.

    Needle in the Groove by Jeff Noon
    There are some writers who you just want to crawl inside the heads of, just for a moment, to find out how one earth they weave the worlds they write, only for a teeny-tiny moment, mind, because it would be a terrifying place to stay too long as a visitor. I was too young to hit Manchester’s Madchester / Hacienda scene, but my sister wasn’t, and I heard about Jeff Noon from her. I learnt to play the bass shortly before I found this book, so I immediately liked Elliot. The first thing you notice is the lack of any punctuation other than a / to separate sentences. Growing up with a linguist father and a speech therapist mother, I adore language play, which is a theme I guess throughout my top ten. Noon writes modern day science fiction that somehow seems so real it’s borderline regular fiction, with slightly weird and fantastical stuff going on. A bit like Murakami’s writing. Vurt nearly took it, but Needle in the Groove was my first Noon experience, so…

    All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman
    Was oddly enough, the first book I bought from The Book Depository. It was recommended to me by an ex-girlfriend, and written long before Heroes or My Super-ex-girlfriend or whatever that movie with Uma Thurman was, came to our screens. The story of a regular guy, who’s fallen in love with a superhero, in fact, unsurprisingly enough, all his friends are superheroes. All the superheroes have kinda normal superpowers, per Falling Girl, who “won’t go higher than the second floor of any building… A small sample of things she’s fallen from include trees, cars, grace, first-storey windows, horses, ladders, bicycles, the wagon, countless kitchen counters and her grandmother’s knee.” It’s a really short book, but utterly, utterly wonderful, and it puts a very silly smile on your face.

    We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
    Reading this book was like having a heart attack every few sentences. The translation is perfectly written. The ideas sensational, the world Zamyatin creates is astonishing. And all the more so for writing it 22 years before Orwell’s 1984, which was directly inspired by We. That feeling of terror, that horrible twisting in your stomach at the end of 1984 when the picture speaks and the couple are caught, is a feeling you get at the beginning of We which runs to the end until you feel you’re going to burst and then it does and you just want to run around telling everyone you know to read it, how amazing it was written so long ago, and while you’re doing all this you’re starting to read it all over again…

    The Book Depository

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    South London Press Interview

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    South London PressBen at the back with, from left, Samantha Cregan, 15, Charlene George, 15 and Shane Dickens, 13

    KIDS at a special school were treated to a visit by an actor and author attempting to serve up Shakespeare on toast.

    Ben Crystal is on a mission to help people of all ages engage and understand one of this country’s writing greats.
    He has written a new book called Shakespeare On Toast and has visited Pendragon school in Downham in a bid to bring some excitement to the famous plays and poems.

    Ben said: “The kids were fantastic, it was such a great day, I was blown away by them.
    “It’s a question of getting them to speak some Shakespeare and get away from the idea that its so difficult, and they really went for it.
    “The problem in engaging with Shakespeare starts at school but it affects people in their 20s too, even my grandmother.
    “It gets tarnished almost with the label of ‘literature’ and is seen as quite elitist but Shakespeare wrote for the masses.
    “I try to make them remember that this stuff is a hundred years old but can still be compared with modern pop culture.”

    The 31-year-old has acted in Shakespeare productions at the Globe in Southwark.
    His book has been praised by Dame Judi Dench and award-winning director Sir Richard Eyre.
    Copies of the book were donated to the school and some of the students received their own signed copy.

    Pendragon School is a secondary school that caters for pupils with a range of additional needs and works with the company Artists in Residence to bring actors and performers to the children to help creative engagement.

    Ben added: “I first saw the kids from this school down at South Bank performing music and I said, ‘I really want to part of this school’. The work the teachers do there is phenomenal and the kids are great.”

    Michael Stringer

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    South London Press Interview

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    South London PressBen at the back with, from left, Samantha Cregan, 15, Charlene George, 15 and Shane Dickens, 13

    KIDS at a special school were treated to a visit by an actor and author attempting to serve up Shakespeare on toast.

    Ben Crystal is on a mission to help people of all ages engage and understand one of this country’s writing greats.
    He has written a new book called Shakespeare On Toast and has visited Pendragon school in Downham in a bid to bring some excitement to the famous plays and poems.

    Ben said: “The kids were fantastic, it was such a great day, I was blown away by them.
    “It’s a question of getting them to speak some Shakespeare and get away from the idea that its so difficult, and they really went for it.
    “The problem in engaging with Shakespeare starts at school but it affects people in their 20s too, even my grandmother.
    “It gets tarnished almost with the label of ‘literature’ and is seen as quite elitist but Shakespeare wrote for the masses.
    “I try to make them remember that this stuff is a hundred years old but can still be compared with modern pop culture.”

    The 31-year-old has acted in Shakespeare productions at the Globe in Southwark.
    His book has been praised by Dame Judi Dench and award-winning director Sir Richard Eyre.
    Copies of the book were donated to the school and some of the students received their own signed copy.

    Pendragon School is a secondary school that caters for pupils with a range of additional needs and works with the company Artists in Residence to bring actors and performers to the children to help creative engagement.

    Ben added: “I first saw the kids from this school down at South Bank performing music and I said, ‘I really want to part of this school’. The work the teachers do there is phenomenal and the kids are great.”

    Michael Stringer

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    Angel & North Interview

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    Angel & North InterviewBen Crystal by Scott Wishart

    Sitting outside a café just off Old Street, Ben Crystal is interrupted every 30 seconds or so by a panoply of cars revving, motorbikes speeding and trucks beeping deafeningly as they reverse. Nothing, however, seems able to dispel Ben’s jubilant mood. He has a play, One Minute (at the time of writing taking place at N1’s Courtyard Theatre), on the go that he’s both producing and acting in, and a new book, Shakespeare on Toast, coming out.

    The latter is his first book to be written solo, following the success of two other tomes on the Bard co-written with his father, David. As it turns out, the press night of his play and the publication of the book clash spectacularly, falling on exactly the same day. One must surely be enough, so is he close to breaking point? “It’s the most exciting thing in the world!” he exclaims to a surprised interviewer. “It’s all kicking off. Sometimes I feel like this is the day I’ve been working towards for the last ten years.”

    Our pot of tea arrives. “I’ll be mother,” he quips, falsetto, and takes charge. With his languorous, theatrical body language and intense, grey-eyed gaze, Ben seems every inch the thespian. “I’ve always known that I wanted to be an actor,” he says, “but I knew the jobs would probably be thin on the ground. I’m good with words, so I thought writing or editing would be a good sort of back up career – and when I found this hole on the shelf, the urge to fill it was irresistible.”

    His book is, for want of a better word, a Shakespearean manual, without any of the dry drudge that very word suggests. The style is chatty, but still manages to get across the deep love and passion he obviously feels for Shakespeare’s work. “There wasn’t this in-between that made Shakespeare accessible without dumbing him down,” he explains. “The book is about the way to get into Shakespeare through a lot of acting techniques that I’ve learnt – and if you can own these techniques, then you can go to any speech, any scene, any play and own Shakespeare for yourself.”

    Some people may find having not one, but two careers on the go – neither of which are known for their stability – a little stressful, so does Ben? “It’s fabulous!” he exclaims again. “I couldn’t sit in an office for the rest of my life. This instability, this not knowing… I love it. It’s exhausting having all these balls in the air, but it’s brilliant too.” But how about the fear if ‘never being employed again’? It seems a shame to dampen his spirits, but isn’t that what all actors complain about? Of course, it doesn’t dampen his spirits at all. “Absolutely, of course there’s that, but I think when you feel that terror, that’s when you are really living.”

    So what are the ultimate ambitions of a man as apparently fearless as Ben? This is the question that keeps him silent longest of all. “All I’ve ever wanted was to do good work with good people, who are passionate about what they are doing,” is his answer eventually. “And that’s all I’ve ever done, really. This is perfect. I couldn’t ask for anything more. My book is coming out and I’m going to act in a play that I really care about. Both of these projects are my babies – this is it really, this is the best.” It’s official: his optimistic outlook on life is sickening and you can’t even hate him for it. “I am absolutely sickening,” he agrees, gleefully.
    Emily Paine

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    About.com Interview

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    Interview with About.com’s Lee Jamieson
    Ben Crystal is the author of Shakespeare on Toast (published by Icon Books), a new book that dispels the myth that Shakespeare is difficult. Here, he shares his thoughts about performing Shakespeare and reveals his top tips for first-time actors.

    About.com: Is performing Shakespeare difficult?

    Ben Crystal: Well, yes … and so it should be! These plays are over 400 years old. They contain cultural gags and references that are completely obscure to us. But they’re also hard to perform because Shakespeare was so darned good at tapping into the human heart – so, as an actor you can’t allow yourself to hold back. If you can’t go to the depths of your soul, explore the extremes of yourself, go to the bad place as Othello or Macbeth, then you shouldn’t be on the stage.

    You have to think about the big speeches in Shakespeare as the most important things the character has ever said; they need to be spoken with your chest cut open, your heart bare, and with tremendous passion. You need to tear the words from the sky. If you don’t feel like you’ve run a marathon when you’re done, you’re not doing it right. It takes courage to open yourself up to an audience like that, letting them see your insides without desperately trying to show them – it takes practice.

    About.com: What’s your advice to someone performing Shakespeare for the first time?

    Ben Crystal: Don’t treat it lightly, but don’t treat it too seriously either. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s similar to the notion of having to act truthfully in a big space, which many actors struggle with. It’s a tricky balance, and Shakespeare asks you to deal with these huge ideas and emotions which all too often lead you into “over-acting” – stay away from big gestures and over-the-top characterizations.

    A lot of what you need to know is on the page already. So it is tricky, and you have to work at it, but it’s also the best fun in the world. Enjoy it. Learn your lines so well you can go running or do the washing up while saying them. Only once they’re a deep part of you, can you start playing. A lot of people take Shakespeare’s plays far too seriously, and forget that important word: “play”. It’s a game, so enjoy it! You can’t “play” with your fellow actors if you’re trying to remember your lines.

    About.com: Has Shakespeare left clues to actors in the text?

    Ben Crystal: Yes, I think so. So does Peter Hall, Patrick Tucker, and a fair few others. Whether or not he actually did is always going to be up for debate. Going back to an original text like the First Folio will help. It’s the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, edited by two of his leading actors. They would have wanted to create a book on how to perform their colleague’s plays, not how to read them – 80% of Elizabethans couldn’t read! So the First Folio is as close to Shakespeare’s intended scripts as we can possibly get.

    When modern editors of the plays are making a new edition, they go back to the First Folio and remove capitalized letters, change spellings and switch speeches between characters because they’re looking at the plays from a literary point of view, not a dramatic one. Bearing in mind that Shakespeare’s company would perform a new play every day, they simply wouldn’t have had much time to rehearse. Therefore, the theory goes that much of the stage direction is written into the text. Indeed, it is possible to work out where to stand, how fast to speak, and what your character’s state of mind is, all from the text.

    About.com: How important is it to understand iambic pentameter before performing?

    Ben Crystal: That depends on how much you respect the writer you’re working with. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are written in that particular rhythmical style, so to ignore it would be foolish. Iambic pentameter is the rhythm of our English language and of our bodies – a line of that poetry has the same rhythm as our heartbeat. A line of iambic pentameter fills the human lung perfectly, so it’s the rhythm of speech. One could say that it’s a very human sounding rhythm and Shakespeare used it to explore what it is to be human.

    On a slightly less abstract note, iambic pentameter is a line of poetry with ten syllables, and all the even-numbered syllables have a slightly stronger stress. That’s a direction by itself – the stronger stresses usually fall on the important words.

    About.com: So what about lines with less than ten syllables?

    Ben Crystal: Well, either Shakespeare couldn’t count and was an idiot – or he was a genius and knew what he was doing. When there are less than ten syllables in a line, he’s giving the actor room to think. If the meter changes at any point, it’s a direction from Shakespeare to his actors about the character they’re playing. It sounds quite complicated, but actually, once you know what you’re looking for, it’s incredibly straightforward. Shakespeare knew that his actors would have had this rhythm flowing through their veins, and so would his audience. If he broke the rhythm, they’d feel it.

    To not understand as an actor is to not understand 80% of the style Shakespeare wrote in, and the same amount again of what makes his writing so terrific.

    Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal is published by Icon Books.

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    Toast on CNN – Watch it here…

    CNN segment on YouTube:

    CNN – Tonight at 9pm!

    I’m appearing on CNN tonight, in celebration of Will’s birthday, talking about all things Shakespeare.

    Do tune in if you can. The show is Connect the World: With Becky Anderson and is on 9pm-10pm GMT.

    Best – and Happy Birthday Will!

    B