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 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.

What's depressing, in a way, thinking of Margaret Thatcher legacy - and she was no doubt great in many ways - but the arts in the UK are still having to justify that it is a profitable business rather than a frivolity. It's one of the greatest UK exports, one of the reasons people come to the UK, and yet we're still having to justify our existence in terms of funding.

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.

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 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.

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."