What you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and a sense of yourself.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.

I was an exchange student for a summer, and most of that summer was in Ukraine. I used to say 'the Ukraine' until I was there, and one of the Ukrainian college students I got to be good friends with, he said, 'Do you say I'm going back to the Texas,' and I said, 'No.' He said, 'We don't say we're going back to the Ukraine, either.'

They were often the first students in their family to go to college and the very idea of higher education was still foreign to them. They had to make a conscious and often difficult decision to come to college.

I am naturally centre-left so the areas of education there are things on which I could work quite closely with Labour on... For example, on trying in Parliament to abolish SATs, I would be the first one through the gates.

We love the precepts for the teacher's sake.