It's a book that makes me laugh and think - it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide!

Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every single sentence in Voltaire seems to advance the story, and yet stand alone as a sound-bite.

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a way into something important happening in modern-day culture.

We are now so far advanced in our denial of evil that we want to rationalise it away.

There is a remarkable nimbleness of style, a balancing act of tone, in Voltaire, which is hard to bring off on stage. When you speak the words out loud, the effect is very different from when you read them. So one needs to do something new with a stage performance, not simply 'tell the story'.

I have not chosen to create a linear story, but a series of different narratives: in the end there are five plays that almost, but don't quite, add up to one play... I start with the story of Candide, being performed as a play within a play, to bring the audience up to speed with the story.

It's a book that makes me laugh and think - it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide!