There is the question of language. Although the play [Candid] is not written in strict verse form, there is an underlying beat of rhyming couplets, with echoes of Pope and the tradition of eighteenth-century philosophical verse.

Voltaire's novel [Candid] offers us parallel universes, the possibility of entering into alternative worlds existing side by side, and this is something quite modern. Nested narratives and parallel universes are popular at the moment in many different art forms.

The financial crisis happened because no-one could actually say out loud how bad things were.

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

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.

Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly.

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.