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You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.

Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire - when you're telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

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

My parents are the reason I wanted to make Shakespeare available to ordinary people.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.

At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.