Well. I enjoy it because it’s easy.

[Q] Is it?

Yes, it’s absolutely dead easy, in a way that I know that most of the work in science is extremely difficult. I mean, that’s what makes me slightly uneasy about being in it. The originality that I bring to it is not achieved by anything that I would call hard work which is comparable to the hard work which has to be put in order to make a really major contribution to the development of science. I can go in, as I do each day, to rehearsal, really not knowing what I’m going to do that morning, I haven’t got plans or schemes.

I’ve got a rough idea before I start the whole thing where I’m going to set it and what I feel it might be about, in general, very general, but the actual process of rehearsing it is a question of just playing nursery games. I mean, not doing what some of my more pretentious contemporaries do, playing improvisionational games in order to find out, to loosen up people's... the actors' imaginations, but just simply finding different ways of saying the words which are written down opposite the character's names that they’re playing.  And I do it without any sort of complicated theories. It isn’t something about which you can be that theoretical compared to, say, you know, cosmology or physics.

[Q] But at the rehearsal how do you get the ideas for what you want done?

I don’t know. I’ve got no idea. I mean, by being familiar with social history, with social anthropology, which I’ve read all my life, by knowing what... by being interested in how people washed their clothes, the extent to which they did, the extent to which they washed their bodies, what they expected of succession, what they expected of monarchs.  But all this is simply being acquainted with social theory and social history, which I, you know, I sort of read about all the time, and as soon as you start... as soon as you get appointed to do a play, it becomes apparent what it’s about.