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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.