Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a theatre director, the son of an affluent middle-class Manchester family, he went up to

Cambridge determined to be an actor. He left saying he was a director and in the

16 years since then his successes have been large and consistent.

They include Miss Saigon, Wind in the Willows,

Xerxes at the ENO, Carousel,

and most recently the importance of being earnest.

Art for all and down with the barriers is his philosophy and if

there's an element of showbiz in all his work he's not ashamed of it. He is

Nicholas, you've said that you need almost to sniff the possibility of a piece being a monster hit

when you're considering whether to take it on or not which is a very showbiz thing to say.

I think what I mean by that is that whatever I'm involved in, I want it to be as

accessible as possible to the largest possible number of people and whether it is

carousel or whether it's the Tempest. I want as many people as possible to join in that

experience. There are all sorts of ways of making this mythical monster hit.

If you're doing the Tempest, for instance, what you've got to do is find an actor of extraordinary charisma to play Prospero, and I asked John Wood to play Prospro if you're doing carousel you want to make

sure that the truth at the center of it is pristine but also open.

So is it your feeling that if you can capture the visual imagination of the audience

that then you've got a better chance of getting the real message

the intellectual message across is can I put it as simplistically as that? No because I

think that that I have on occasion been seduced by what might be called an element of visual display

...