I’ve always, I suppose, liked Shakespeare more than anything else about the theatre. It was Shakespeare that first got me involved in the theatre at all. I remember a couple of rather tatty Arts Council touring companies taking Twelfth Night around the schools and that was my first impression of live drama, apart from the odd pantomime or whatever. And I found that fairly exciting. But when I went with the school at the age of fifteen to see Olivier’s films of Henry V and Hamlet that was when I was really hooked. I couldn’t believe that words could be so exciting, that a play could be so overpowering, and from that moment on I became a slavish imitator of Olivier, at least for some years, and I wanted nothing more than to become part of the same world that he had made, created from the text of Shakespeare.
I think still that Shakespeare is my greatest love in the theatre and that eventually, I don’t know what the future holds, but I can’t think of anything that would please me more than a more or less permanent Shakespearian company of my own, not just playing Shakespeare but making that the basis of our work.
In fact my respect for Shakespeare is so great that I don’t mind seeing him knocked about and put in modern dress or cut or changed or whatever. I think if I thought less of him I might be worried by that but after all, the text is always there to go and look up afterwards and the important thing is not to do it the way the scholars think it should be done but to make it come alive for whatever audience you happen to be playing to, whether it’s schoolchildren or if you’re playing in the suburbs or whatever, you have to bring it alive for that particular audience and that particular occasion.
