I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

I live in New York, so I'm used to the audiences that cheer and clap through a play. It is unusual for London audiences.

I think where Playground is heading is deeper into that marriage between stage, film and television, with the increasing number of people in the film business working in television, obviously something that we were very influential in starting and doing at HBO. And I think that that's the focus of where I see the company moving forward, continuing to explore that intersection of all that talent.

I think people want the intimacy in the engagement of sitting in a theater with people and seeing something happen live and engage in that. I think that could be a very powerful experience.

The theater is a communal experience, and whatever the emotional connection between an audience member and the actors onstage, it ripples through the whole audience. Part of the fun of the play is being a part of that audience.

The notion that the staging of the play Harry Potter should be raw magic and street theater rather than high-tech theater, was essential.

I think that's so particularly exciting about this moment in time is all the new platforms that are now existing, the Netflixes and the Hulus and Amazons and so and so forth; I mean they are really doing what pay TV was doing twenty years ago. So a show like Dancing On The Edge gets to have a digital life after it's playing on Starz. I think what's exciting is how these new platforms are providing more opportunities both for first-run programming on the one hand but also for second plays for shows that have appeared first either on traditional broadcast or on cable.