Mountain Language/Ashes To Ashes

Acting in these two plays appealed to me because I knew we'd meet Harold Pinter. I've done a lot of classical drama which involves interpreting what Chekhov or Shakespeare might have meant. It's a great treat for an actor to work with a living writer who you can ask.

The cast has met Harold a couple of times. Because he's also a performer and a director, he doesn't have that mistrust of people working with his material that you sometimes get from the less experienced. He's very precise but not obsessionally possessive about what he has written. I think he wants to see what a new generation of performers and a different director might make of it.

The first play, Mountain Language, is about the suppression of language and freedom of speech. I think it was originally inspired by the Kurds in Turkey, whose language was suppressed. I love the way that putting these two plays together makes you think that the horrors of an oppressive regime could be part of your personal world as well.

If you see horrendous events around the world on the news, you can easily objectify this and think that these events only happen in distant countries. But the second play, Ashes To Ashes shows us a long-term relationship which contains a private domestic regime that is as oppressive - and makes clear that in our private lives we do the same things to each other.

Juxtaposing these two plays makes it first seem like watching instances of oppression and attempts to cover them up on television - and being sucked into the middle of it. Then in the second play you come back and find yourself seeing the same oppression all around you.