I always call Billy Elliot a fantasy autobiography because I never wanted to be a dancer, but I got a lot of stick from the other kids about wanting to be a writer and being interested in drama.

I always call Billy Elliot a fantasy autobiography because I never wanted to be a dancer, but I got a lot of stick from the other kids about wanting to be a writer and being interested in drama.

Culture is something that we all share and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it.

In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall - that when the play is finished, it's done - but now I realise it's more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living.

From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.

In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.

Whether you are a writer, or an actor, or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.