In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall – that when the play is finished, it’s done – but now I realise it’s...

There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I’m such...

From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.

I only tend to think of the week ahead, to keep my eye on the ball and question whether a full stop is in the right place. It’s easy to get distracted by the wrong...

The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience’s eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What...

My generation of playwrights have grown up writing for studio theatres, and so the task of writing for more than ten or so actors is a huge challenge. Logistically, it’s like doing an enormous Sudoku....

In a way, ‘Billy Elliot’ was autobiographical. I can’t dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That’s what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that...

I always call ‘Billy Elliot’ a fantasy autobiography because I never wanted to be a dancer, but I got a lot of stick from the other kids about wanting to be a writer and being...

I don’t really find things funny unless they’re deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you’re funny just for the sake of being funny, it’s just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best...

I come from a tradition where the writer writes a play for the actors, rather than for himself, and the dialogue is made to work onstage, so it needs actors to help shape it. So...

Culture is something that we all share, and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it.

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.

I don’t think theatre has changed; it’s society that has changed.