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I've never been that keen on Shakespeare.

I had always wanted to retell a Shakespeare play. It was an ambition from college days. But in order to be able to do it... the circumstances in my life didn't come together for a long time.

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.

I've never really had a desire to do Shakespeare. For me, it's just too many lines.

With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.

Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.