You spend ten years of your life being trained to do one thing, and you're being taught to think that it's the most serious thing that anyone could possibly do, and then suddenly you find yourself doing something that in some respects is the epitome of frivolity.

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.