The classical repertory is in danger of disappearing period. Ibsen, Gorky, Strindberg, Schiller, Sheridan, O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Sean O'Casey, have entirely disappeared from television to the BBC's discredit, but they are also played far less frequently throughout the UK. My whole life in the theatre has been about the advocacy of new work and the reason the National Theatre is so much more exciting than the Comedie Francaise is that the new play is given the same weight and value as the classic. But everyone ought to have access to a tradition before they try to extend it.

I've adapted Katherine Boo's book Behind the Beautiful Forevers for the Olivier theatre in November and we are doing a season of young Chekhov – Ivanov and the Seagull – in new adaptations together at Chichester next year. These are both big ensemble projects which always give me special pleasure. And obviously as the author of The Map of the World, I'm thrilled that there is going to be a large all-Asian company doing two plays at the National Theatre.

Since I was knighted, I have written among other things Via Dolorosa, Stuff Happens, and three films about MI5. If the state's aim, which I don't believe it was, had been to coerce me by honouring me, it has been a spectacular failure.

More often Tony Benn.

Stuff Happens had to be written very fast after the invasion of Iraq. I was fascinated while writing it by the self-torturing liberals who supported the war and the emotional hoops they jumped through to validate their confidence. Hence the Vertical Hour which the Park Theatre is reviving this autumn. As to directors, Richard did seven of my plays. Like all the best directors he came out of new play theatres. Directors are always better for the renewed challenge of working with living writers.

Not the Commitments. The Corrections by Franzen. I worked for three years on 23 drafts. It was never made, and an HBO series – using another writer – was abandoned after the first unscreened episode. The whole experience broke my heart.

Favourite Lancing teacher? Has to be the poet Harry Guest.

I've been asked to write quite a few Le Carre films but I think his work needs the time only television can give. No feature film ever came near the fabulous TV series of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People.

It's funny, that as a writer of fiction that you do make a huge amount up. Nobody in the Worricker films is meant to be anyone. The whole lot came for better or worse, from my imagination.

Carol Reed, obviously. Hitchcock is a given. Alexander Mackendrick for Sweet Smell of Success. Alan Clarke was always a favourite. And I hugely admire Clio Barnard. Inexhaustable films? Too many to mention, but I think Fahardis About Elly is a masterpiece and overlooked. He's the Iranian who made A Separation but the earlier film is just as good. It's Chekhov for the cinema.

Absolutely nothing about Pravda annoyed me. Anthony Hopkins and Howard Brenton brought two years of unadulterated joy and laughter into my life.

I want to say this is a very interesting question, swat. Maybe, The Rite of Spring, by definition, doesn't come along very often. Angels in America let fresh air into the US theatre at the end of the last century. But in the UK, I agree, you have to go back to the 70s to name a radical play which changed the whole theatre.

It would have to be a play, which was known and recognised by people who don't regularly follow the particular artform.

The key event was the miners' strike and to my great shame I didn't realise it at the time. The strike now has a potency in popular culture similar to the first world war – the decisive moment at which a government attacked the idea of community and began seriously dismantling the post-war settlement. The financial crisis of 2008 has torpedoed free-market / Ayn Rand / Milton Friedman capitalism below the waterline. But we have no politicians with the guts to say so.

Done. The BBC recently transmitted Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield, as songjarosa said. I hope they will be around as long and be seen as often as Page Eight. They were made with the same excitement.

I chaired the Yale Drama prize a couple of years ago and we read a thousand scripts, every single one by what you call 'unknowns'. The winner was Lidless by Frances Ya-Chu-Cowhig. She went onto write The World of Extreme Happiness which was the best play of last year. There are lots of good young writers – more than at any time I remember. The young writers have got good again.

Happily, I know the answer to the bucket of money question. I was asked to write and co-direct two of the last three Star Wars. And have never regretted saying no both times.

Yes, like you, I loathe corporate sponsorship. And now it's infuriating to be lectured by the very politicians who insisted on private money to pay for the arts, telling us that theatre is failing to reach the people at large. The Arts Council, with its tiny budget, is being used to provide an alibi for the deep failures of policy at the Department of Education, with its huge budget. Until music, art, dance and drama, are restored in schools, it's an unequal fight. But London theatres need to tour much much more as they do in Spain and France. Their neglect of touring is scandalous.

Take the moral questions seriously – you do have a responsibility to people you represent. And shake up the style for all you're worth. The best documentary theatre, like Alecky Blythe's London Road, does new things with the form.

I find the more you work with the same people, the more you raise each other's game. Skylight is directed by Stephen Daldry – our fifth collaboration – Bob Crowley designs it – our ninth – and Bill Nighy acts in it – our tenth. And the fun is Matthew Beard and Carey Mulligan, who is the best Nina ever in the Seagull.