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 think William Shakespeare's like a passport through your life: as a kid hearing about a play with fairies or witches or ghosts, you get excited by that possibility. Then later on you become interested in the psychology or the politics or the beauty of the language. You grow up with the plays. King Lear is one that I don't feel grown up enough to do yet.

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.

Sometimes it can get overburdened with nuance - the actors find all sorts of different spins on the lines that can lose simplicity and directness. They all become fond of their extra stresses and the audience are going, "Just give me the line simply, what did you mean?" You have to ward against that.

By the time I came of age and, indeed, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, I had seen the entire William Shakespeare canon, which, in those days, you were quite able to do. Now, it's a much harder thing. Mrs. Thatcher was really axing public subsidy for the arts.

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.