The perfect theatre should make you feel as if your presence has made a difference. Going to the theatre, going to any live performance, is an event and the staff need to have a sense of that, too. It's terribly alienating if you feel that it's just any old job for the people working front of house. The theatre itself needs to create a relationship between the performer and the audience — no one in the audience should feel that they're getting an unreasonably prejudiced view of the actor. It's important that they're not too far away, they can hear, they can see, they can feel in some sense in contact with what's going on stage. The proportions of an auditorium are important.

They have to respond to the human voice and the scale of the human body. If an auditorium dwarfs the human body, there's something wrong with it because you can't deny the human form at the heart of drama. A lot of theatres in the late nineteenth century got it right because they managed to shape an auditorium that somehow embraces the stage. I like theatres that have a sense of the past in them. Like worn stone steps in a church, you get the sense of layers of human presence. From the point of view of the plays, you can't have something for everybody. You can't second-guess an audience because they don't know what they're going to want to see. When you visit the theatre, you want something done in a way you can't imagine, otherwise you may as well have stayed at home.