What does the theatre offer which the cinema and television do not

They must deliver the same performance with new energy each time they perform, to get the job done. Look forward to authentic Italian at Prezzo, classic French dining in the Boulevard Brasserie, or even Cabana's take on spicy Brazilian street food. I always offer to take the journalist around London in a taxi where I can show them boarded up shops, boarded up offices, boarded up factories and boarded up pubs.

Photograph: Johan Persson As ever, when I see a Shakespeare production, I am struck by how much I remember from schooldays, but how little I actually understood at the time.

Theatres in Early Modern England were not like the theatres we have today, they were open-air which means they were much like our modern sports stadiums and the audience tended to act much like modern sports spectators.

You lose, I think, the pure concentration on the poetry in the cinema, but gain in the visual sense, as the unitary view of the proscenium arch is broken and reframed over and over.

It is now regarded as one of the most respected theatre conservatoires in the world. Q: What makes a theatre production great? When you are making work you see rehearsals and so forth, but what the piece becomes when an audience joins the process translates it to another stage.