In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

The cool thing about making a Western is that people want to be in them. You rarely get the opportunity. With horror movies you are always trying to convince them. People in horror are always worried it's going to be this schlocky thing, and you're always trying to convince them that it's not. With Westerns, people immediately react with, "Oh, I've always wanted to do one."

The foyers now look ridiculously small to us because not all that many people used them.

Lord Chamberlain's readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there's quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.