Before the death of Steven Pimlott, for whom I played Richard II at the RSC, he and I discussed filming the White Box production that we'd done at The Other Place in 2000. We thought long and hard about a proper space for this modern-dress version that could encompass the White Box's triple identity as laboratory, operating theatre and madhouse. Eventually we decided it would be exciting to film it after hours at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), with Richard standing before pictures of his Tudor successors before wandering down the uncluttered corridors of the twenty-first century to look at photographs of Kate Moss and muse on the nature of celebrity and kingship. I’m sorry we never got to do it, partly because it's a good idea, antidotal to the BBC Hollow Crown which (good though it was) presented a fairly conventional view of Richard II as a play of pageantry, spectacle and divine right, and partly because our NPG version might have been a worthy pendant to this one by Ashtar Theatre, which was aggressively secular and political at every turn.

The original Globe was named at a time when theatre wasn't embarrassed to trumpet its significance; perhaps the greatest achievement of this Globe to Globe Festival is to remind us of that. The Greeks thought life on stage was useful while we decided how best to live our lives off stage. Now we name our theatres after actors or monarchs. Now is the summer of our Diamond Jubilee. What, today, is the global significance of Richard II? The play has been many things to many people: a hymn to the divine right of kings, an exploration of what it means to be mortal, fuel to those about to attempt a coup. Inevitably with this production the last of those looms largest. On 7 February 1601, supporters of the Earl of Essex paid the Chamberlain's Men to stage a performance of Richard II the night before their armed rebellion. Where did they stage it? At the Globe, of course.