1960 January 18
Ashford, Kent
Actor, Director

[We] have a reasonable doubt that the man from Stratford wrote all these works, and that the name Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, is actually a pseudonym for another writer. Now back in 2007, how would you find out about this? There were a number of different people researching different candidates, and they would always open their books with a chapter saying why they doubted the man from Stratford. So you would read this over and over again in many different books, which then went on to argue a separate candidate, and a number of us were very impressed by a book by a wonderful American scholar Diana Price called Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography, where Diana collects mostly orthodox scholarship about the man from Stratford, a lot of stuff that's not included in the biographies of the man from Stratford because it's problematic. And she makes a very good case for why there is a question.

I got a job at the RSC in '82 and did two and a half years with them playing Ariel to Derek Jacobi's Prospero, playing with a number of great actors .. Bob Peck, Helen Mirren, Sinéad Cusack, Michael Gambon, David Bradley, the company was chock-a-block full of wonderful actors, so I learnt a lot. It was a kindergarten run by the mafia. It was what we actors felt about it, it was very director-led. There wasn't much .. We'd go to the pub afterwards and these actors would be singing and telling stories and playing games and they were wild, wonderful characters. Pete Postlethwaite was in the company. You might want to slip away before things got too drunken as it would sometimes turn nasty. But they were really rich, fantastic people. But in the rehearsal room, no offense intended, but it was so literary and acad- ..university-led and planned out by the directors and staged and blocked, all the actors sat around the room half asleep, reading their newspapers, and I as a young actor felt I'd always grown up in school having a lot of input into the story and being very involved, and I just felt none of our natural energy was being involved. We were all just being controlled and moved around. And once opening night passed the directors never came back. They were only interested in their reviews. One very famous director at that time, really successful director, I couldn't believe he would open up his briefcase full of reviews and shared his reviews like they were reports from a school, and I thought, you don't need these people to approve what you're doing, you're a genius for Shakespeare, but there was something about like getting good marks and so it wasn't really theatrical I found, it led me to leave the RSC and try to work without directors.

Associated Plays: