I think William Shakespeare's like a passport through your life: as a kid hearing about a play with fairies or witches or ghosts, you get excited by that possibility. Then later on you become interested in the psychology or the politics or the beauty of the language. You grow up with the plays. King Lear is one that I don't feel grown up enough to do yet.
Sometimes the parallels that are brought in can make the play seem less relevant; you can deny a play's application to the universal by making it too specific. Sometimes having a modern context does make things easier to grasp; sometimes, you go, "Why have they got swords?" "Why didn't Juliet just text Romeo? Why did she bother posting a letter? Why was the Milan post service so bad?" It throws up irrelevant questions that don't help.
By the time I came of age and, indeed, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I had seen the entire William Shakespeare canon, which, in those days, you were quite able to do. Now, it's a much harder thing. Mrs. Thatcher was really axing public subsidy for the arts.
I always feel emotionally engaged in productions. If I ever get to the point where I don't feel emotionally engaged, maybe I should stop. You have to make each play an event. Whether that's star leading actors or the concept behind the production.
King Lear by William Shakespeare frightens me. I've never done King Lear, I guess partially because my father dwindled into dementia in his last years and King Lear is such an accurate portrayal of a father figure suffering from dementia - the play was almost intolerable for me.
I was doing an interview with Charlie Rose and he said, "What do you think about Margaret Thatcher?" - and I had not heard she had died at this point - and he said, "Is there any kind of Shakespearian overtone here?" I said, "Well, actually, Julius Caesar, because ever if a politician was stabbed in the back, it was Mrs. Thatcher, by all her conspiratorial cabinet, which really did just stab her in the back." It's a rather interesting resonance.
I went to a Jesuit school and they did a William Shakespeare play every year. I got to know Shakespeare as parts I wanted to play. I missed out on playing Ophelia - it was an all-boys school. The younger boys used to play the girls, I played Lady Anne in Richard III and Lady Macbeth, then Richard II and Malvolio. I just became a complete Shakespeare nut, really.
Sometimes it can get overburdened with nuance - the actors find all sorts of different spins on the lines that can lose simplicity and directness. They all become fond of their extra stresses and the audience are going, "Just give me the line simply, what did you mean?" You have to ward against that.
At the assassination of Caesar when Cassius says, "How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown!" And you kind of went, "Never was there a truer word spoken."
I don't think Vladimir Putin goes to the theater enough to even deign to think there was any criticism intended. We were invited by Moscow. Maybe they wanted a particular production of Julius Caesar in order to remind Putin that he was vulnerable, but that wasn't our intention.
My first interaction with William Shakespeare was an American production and there was an actress, playing Puck, who sounded like Mickey Mouse. When she said, I'll put a girdle around the earth in 40 minutes," I was amazed - the idea of Puck traveling around the Earth in 40 minutes was amazing to me. My dad, who was a scientist, I remember him telling me that Sputnik circled the globe in an hour in a half. And I thought, "Wow, Puck is twice as fast as Sputnik."
The list of potential candidates for Julius Caesar is quite large. You could go, "Well, he's a Caesar." Idi Amin, or Bokassa in the Central African Empire, or in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe coming to power. They have all, at some point in their lives, been candidates for a casting as Julius Caesar.
There's a wonderful author named Can Themba, who said that Africa extends a fraternal handshake to Shakespeare. That William Shakespeare would have recognized Elizabethan England more readily in Africa today than in England today.
What's depressing, in a way, thinking of Margaret Thatcher legacy - and she was no doubt great in many ways - but the arts in the UK are still having to justify that it is a profitable business rather than a frivolity. It's one of the greatest UK exports, one of the reasons people come to the UK, and yet we're still having to justify our existence in terms of funding.
I have seen productions of Julius Caesar that set it in a modern, Western context and it just looks as though they're getting rid of a particularly cantankerous chairman of the board rather than the great leader of the world.
I guess, is we are not saying, "Look, William Shakespeare's written a critique of modern Africa." What we're saying is that we've shifted the metaphor to make it more immediate.
Really what Brutus and Cassius do by assassinating Caesar, is open up a vacuum into which much more ruthless people run. Julius Caesar is an amazingly contemporary, resonant, politically astute play.
