Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?

You don't really need modernity in order to exist totally and fully. You need a mixture of modernity and tradition.

'Visiting Mr. Green' is a good play. I enjoy being in it, and I have a wonderful colleague, Aidan deSalaiz, to work with. Audiences like it a lot. What's not to like?

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. To me it was meaningless. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sings about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.

I prefer to choose which traditions to keep and which to let go.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.