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.

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.

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.

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."

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.