In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly ski….

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience..

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrog….

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature..

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespe….

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe tha….

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the arti….

Mem'ry All alone in the moonlight I can smile at the old days Life was beautiful then..

The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare ….

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do..

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater..

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable..

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a….

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that ….

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thou….

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed..

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with….

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call….

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in nee….

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity..

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to d….