121 - Plutarch and Shakespeare, w/ The Base Creates

**Morgan Watkins** (0:00)
Lots of people are cut off from the old world, almost like people are cut off on a little island. They've just gone. But there's a thread back to this world, right? There's a bridge back to this world.

**Alex Petkas** (0:09)
The people who keep the classics alive, the people who keep the tradition alive, is not the scholars, it's the people creating new things out of it, creating new meaning out of it.

**George Carter** (0:19)
When Shakespeare created his plays, he was using something that at the time was 1500 years old, but it felt new, it felt fresh, and it created an entirely new stage culture within London.

**Morgan Watkins** (0:29)
I can feel Shakespeare as a writer reading this and then writing his scenes. It's almost like he's getting notes from antiquity.

**George Carter** (0:39)
We're asking for one act of a play.

**Morgan Watkins** (0:42)
We just started to encourage people to send in their plays and basically say anything they wanted. And we also do a system like they had in Greece where the audience vote on the night.

**Alex Petkas** (0:53)
Competition actually is part of what drives culture. If you want to bring the best out in people, there have to be stakes.
Plutarch is an author that has inspired stage productions on the theater for a very long time, from classical French theater, and this is the world of Racine and Corneille, to most famously Shakespeare, and to this very day. My guests today include some real life theater practitioners, Morgan Watkins and Ollie Bennett of TheBase couldn't make it today, but they are the leaders of a stage production company that's based in London, and they also have a great podcast and YouTube channel at TheBaseCreates, which you can check out. And helping spearhead their foray into Plutarch is George Carter here with us from Old Sovereign Publishing, who has published a beautiful edition of Plutarch's Lives, and is also sponsoring a drama competition with Old Sovereign to be played and produced, if you compose a drama, we'll get into that, at a stage in London by TheBase Production Company. And this competition is called The Great Panathenaea, which I also want to get into. You know, the theater was such an integral part of classical Greek culture, even and maybe especially to the warrior culture of classical Greece. So I'm really excited to talk to you guys about this contest, maybe also about the theater, both today and Antiquity, and how it's important and interesting, maybe more than you realized, and also what it's like to take stories from Plutarch's lives and put them on the stage in this grand European tradition. So welcome, gentlemen, to The Cost of Glory.

**Morgan Watkins** (2:55)
Good to be here. Thanks, Alex.

**George Carter** (2:57)
Thanks for having us. Much appreciated.

**Alex Petkas** (3:00)
Well, I'm delighted. So I want to start with Morgan of TheBase. So what was your motivation, just as background to introduce yourself, for starting this theatre company? And what was that like?

**Morgan Watkins** (3:15)
So where are we now? 2026 We started this, I think, late, late 2023, actually, in October. We were basically trying to build a cultural resistance to what we'd like to call an experience for like 10 or 15 years, the sort of culture of sensoriousness and fear and what might, I suppose what people might call sort of woke culture, where people were scared to explore, explore anything and speak about anything and sort of express themselves. And also there was a kind of creeping shame being imposed upon all of us, really, in the West. And we wanted to build a company that basically counteracted both of those things. We wanted to kind of create a free place where people could explore and create work without any fear of censorship and a company that would celebrate the sort of Western tradition and the Western canon. And that was the origin of it. And then we started the whole thing by just doing a reading of Prometheus around by Aeschylus in London in October 2023
And it was honestly just as simple as we read the play in a basement in Soho.
And then we had a philosopher responding. And so that was kind of, it was a very sort of simple beginning. We just put the play on in a space. We actually, the tickets were free. And we were keen as well to link our world into the sort of online intellectual world that was building and had been growing for 10 years. You know, sort of almost like Jordan Peterson onwards. It was this kind of these characters, these online intellects were becoming like, they were sort of like rock stars. You know, like Peterson was selling out Wembley Arena stuff in London. And just generally, though, generally speaking, me and Olly found that there was an incredibly exciting intellectual kind of energy in the world actually, so sort of taking, taking hold online. And there was all these figures popping up who were becoming famous for, for being intellects, basically in different, in different areas. And they were more exciting than anything really going on in theater or in film or TV. And so we, we also, we wanted to bridge that gap as well. We wanted to create a company that, that could bring some of these unorthodox thinkers, exciting thinkers and intellects into our world, which was, yeah, as I said, had become incredibly sensorious and was incredibly shameful of its, of its traditions and its history. And so yeah, that was, that was the kind of origin of it. So we just started to do readings and then we would work through different types of plays. We did, we did Prometheus Band, then we did No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. We sort of talked about him as a philosopher. Then we did Faust by Goethe. We explored Goethe. And we did, anyway, we did lots of things. I could sort of ramble on and on and on about them. But we were trying to touch in on like really key texts in the Western tradition that would, would, would speak to now and would speak to the human condition in any time, I would, I would say, and would, yeah, allow us to kind of go, what, what is this? What, where do we come from? Who are we? What is this culture? Because I think the other thing, Alex sort of mentioned is that I'm not, me and Ollie are not saying we are the great intellects that know all about Western culture in a way we're going to spearhead that in our sector and say, look, we need to, we need to learn more about this. Who are we? What don't we know? You know, because you can sit there all day talking about woke culture and how mad and annoying and crazy it all is. And it is, right?