Very few young people know her name today, but Dorothy Squires was the singing sensation of the Fifties and Sixties, and even 30 years ago this talented but difficult star was a regular feature of the headlines thanks to offstage dramas and scandals. But who was the real Dorothy Squires? I first remember meeting Dorothy Squires, as she renamed herself, when I was only three years old. My father, Bert Cecil, a pianist, had befriended her when, aged 15, she had gone to London armed with nothing more than hope and a train ticket.

If this native New Yorker were in a relationship with the city of London, our Facebook status would read: “It’s complicated.” We’ve been through hell together. London is one of my favourite cities. I blissfully cross the pond several times a year to teach and to see my mates. But, this fabulous city also bestowed on me the worst reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life. So, why the heck am I coming back to do yet a show about the very show that shattered my dreams? Insane!

"Why write about Ruth Ellis?"  It’s a question I’ve been asked many times in the run-up to The Thrill of Love and it’s a good one.  I’d like to know the answer, too. 

It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.

I read and loved The Mouse and His Child as a child. Apparently. I was reminded of this by the inscription in the copy I gave to my god-daughter 15 years ago. And again, when I read it to my own daughter 10 years later. It’s such an extraordinarily original, moving, funny, story, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it.

Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "translation". However, I was up for writing a completely new play.

George VI had been my hero since childhood because I was such a terrible stutterer. We had been evacuated from England to the US and during the war, particularly the latter stages, my parents would encourage me to listen to the King’s speeches on the wireless. “Listen, David,” they’d say, “he was a far worse stutterer than you, and listen to him now. He’s not perfect but he can give these magnificent stirring speeches that really work. So there’s hope for you.” It didn’t help me at the time but I thought, wow, he’s brave.

When I lived in the Caribbean in my twenties, one of the books I found at the bottom of the remaindered bin of Kingston’s largest book shop was Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin. I read it without any real sense of its context but there was something about its central idea that struck a chord with me. Perhaps it was living in a society where death and violence were part of everyday life, perhaps it was my own rather bumbling efforts at understanding existentialism that made it remarkable. Esslin talked a great deal about Waiting for Godot.  

I have never seen another Kate so I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the role. I was incredibly excited to play this woman in a play which is regarded as so heavily misogynistic and very much a battle of the sexes - to make this Kate very specific and individual and not just a sweeping generalisation of what it is to be a “woman” living in a patriarchal society.

Someone told me that the highways and byways of England were littered with the bones of little children. It was a shocking statement and of course I asked, “What do you mean?” I was told that abandoned children were a common feature of the past, but that in the 18th century someone called a “Coram Man” used to wander about from village to village and town to town – a bit like a tinker – picking up unwanted children.