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.

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.

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.

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 the parallels that are brought in can make the play seem less relevant; you can deny a play's application to the universal by making it too specific. Sometimes having a modern context does make things easier to grasp; sometimes, you go, "Why have they got swords?" "Why didn't Juliet just text Romeo? Why did she bother posting a letter? Why was the Milan post service so bad?" It throws up irrelevant questions that don't help.

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 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.