It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.
Robert Dessaix[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.
Robert DessaixThose are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.
Robert DessaixYou are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.
Robert Dessaix