Music has always been a part of my spiritual seeking, from the moment that Handel's 'Messiah' gave me the experience when I was so young, and music has meant so much to me since then.

My mother and my father had very, very strong Scots accents. We were Australian, and in those days when I was young, I spoke with a much more of an Australian accent than I have now. However I knew that if I went to England to become an actor, which I was determined to, I knew that I had to get rid of the Australian accent. We were colonials, we were Down Under somewhere, we were those little people Over There. But I was determined to become an Englishman. So I did.

The inter-relationships between people have always fascinated me, as a director. And particularly those who are battlers in life, those who are on the fringes of life, they've always fascinated me, and I've always loved working on those characters.

Any play I do, anything I do in the theatre, it's absolutely essential for me in a sense, to create a family in order to. To create, in other words, to put a group of people together who love to share together what they're doing, rather than be individuals as such.

An actor and a [theatre] director are both what I would call interpreters of work. We interpret a work, just as a musician will interpret a composer's work, we interpret the work of a playwright. We are servants of the theatre and I've always believed that. We must serve what has been written, that's what we're there for.

Identity is a very difficult thing in the theatre. As an actor said to me one day, 'What are we doing today?' when we were doing a workshop. And I said, 'Oh, just be yourself'. And he said to me, 'I don't know who that is, I'm an actor'. And I begin to realise in fact that we seek identity because we're told we should have one, but I wonder whether it's necessary.

I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.