When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.

I appear to be drawn to iconic characters and what they reflect back to our cultures.

After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield.