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I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

My first writing job was with a company called TheatreworksUSA.

I worked on 'Blue Peter' and 'Tonight' and lots of TV plays, filmed people like Rudolf Nureyev and Ted Heath, and ended up a senior cameraman with my own crew. I'd had my first short story published in 1947, and when my writing really started to take off I decided to go freelance, and eventually left the BBC in 1965.

I came to write after several mini careers. I did live theatre, managed a cosmetics store and was a local television personality.

I don't come from an artistic family, so I didn't know what theater was. I was working on Wall Street in the '90s, and I went to see 'Appointment With a High-Wire Lady' at Ensemble Studio Theatre, and it affected me so deeply. It changed everything I thought about the arts. I quit banking and became an actor.

I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I'm also a poet and have had work in the 'Spectator.'

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

By 1949, there was no more work for me out there, and I went to New York in 1950 and just did whatever I could. Mainly television. Some Broadway. A lot of dinner theater work, which is not a very satisfactory medium.