Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.
I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.
It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.
We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short.
The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make.
The character of Robin Hood stands for the deep anger of the dispossessed against the ruling classes.
I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it.
The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.
The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.
Most Robin Hood stories are not very exciting. There are not a lot of surprises.
The 'Mahabharata' is a more complex and longer saga than the 'Ramayana,' which is like a fairy tale. It's much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there's a cracking love story.
'Fall Of A City' aims to convey, in all its emotional richness, the effects of war and the toll taken on city and family by the horrors of siege.
The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me.
All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.
