It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?

King Lear (Director; Vivian Beaumont Theater 4 March to 18 April 2004; 33 performances). The Permissive Society. Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Stage and video director; 2003).

He has also become a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in both Britain and the United States. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s he first came to prominence in the early 1960s with his role in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and performers Peter Cook Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. In its early days he was an associate director at the Royal National Theatre and later he ran the Old Vic Theatre.