Well I tried to be a bit Egyptian.

Thank you for that! That Hamlet is another favourite of mine. I love it that you picked up John Kani's stab at Mbeki – it wasn't particularly conscious on our part but one would hope that a livewire would pick it up. Just as when I did Othello, I didn't want Richard Haines' Iago to be a carbon copy of Eugène Terre'Blanche but for people just to pick up the reference.

I'm glad you read that piece. The answer to your last question: I don't think actors are ever tempted to accommodate. The actors at the Market Theatre took great pleasure in playing against the grain during those years when the censor held sway. I still find it extraordinary that an authoritarian government did not prosecute the really important plays of the time like Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island and Asinamali etc.

To be honest I'm less interested in the idea of actresses playing Shakespearean male roles than the possibility of male actors having played the women's roles. The mature women's roles. I spent some time in a series of essays I wrote in a book called Not Hamlet about the frail position of women in drama. I've hinted at this before – that people are not interested in the interiority of female dramatic characters – so there are no Hamlets. Hence the title.

I am quite cross with male scholars who think it a given that boys played all Shakespeare's women including that unique creature, Cleopatra. She's probably the most complex of the poet's creations and I think it's daft to gloss that famous line: "I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness in the posture of a whore". You will see that boy is used as a verb. That means to belittle or to diminish. So obviously the poet is saying that if you want to diminish a great women get a boy to play her.

But to get back to your question I'm not sure that apart from the sheer joy of attempting to be a Hamlet or a Lear, any female actor would be able to cast an especially glowing illumination into either of these parts.

Core. It's a very good question. If I thought there was a whole roster of great plays out there which has not been touched for yonks I would find dozens of actors male and female who could find some original slant. But truly, without going through the agony of trying to fill theatre with unknown names you would need to be a maniac to seduce people to pay £60 for a seat when they didn't know what they were getting. The public don't care to take too many chances.

No idea. London is the best place to be. Because it's a country. It's got a boistrousness and a feeling of endless invention that only a great unplanned, unregulated, organism can engender. You create a hub somewhere else you have to have surroundings. And then it has to planned and then it's self-defeating.

Would that there were. I would give my blood to find such a part. All of us old girls moan about there not being meat to get your teeth into when you are at an interesting age. But true to say there are no interesting parts. How sad is that.

I can't think of why not. I remember not stopping laughing for weeks on end. Eric Idle, Robbie Coltrane, and a cracking good story. What more do you want?

I've never met anyone smarter than Hamlet.

One of Hollywood's problems is that they can only ever envisage you as the last person you've played. And there aren't many tiara parts hanging around, nor would I want to play them.

Well, look, I don't think it's a female Hamlet. But I know what you mean. It's one of the few parts written for women that has a subtext the size of Antarctica. Hamlet has no subtext, just a vast landscape of expressed thoughts. The inside of a woman's brain is still not considered the stuff of drama. In other words a woman philosophising is a bit like Jonson's dog on its hindlegs. But Hedda takes up every moment of those four tightly knit acts of Ibsen's play. And it's up to the actress to express a world of secrecy which is only indicated by text. So that's a challenge. And we like a challenge. Not all that many people can give the impression of having much more to say than they have bothered to express.

Peter Greenaway took an evil delight in not explaining his script which I rather admired as the ingenuity of the actors was very much relied on. That said, his attention to visual detail was thrilling to watch unfold. As to what the film was actually about, you might as well ask Hampton Court maze what it's about.

One thing I will say is that when it was shown at the Venice Film Festival those Italians cheered every set-up like it was a winning goal. I've never seen an audience be so noisily, visually aware. Very exciting it was.

Yes. Solomon and Marion is coming to Birmingham and then to the new Print Room in London in the autumn and I think it's a perfectly wonderful play. Human size. Just two people, me and a young man from Khayalitsha. It was his first performance on the professional stage and that young man has real talent – name of Khayalethu Anthony. The play had its genesis in the murder of Brett Goldin in 2006. He was playing Guildenstern is my production of Hamlet which has been invited to Stratford for the RSC's complete works festival. But he never made it. He was murdered on Easter Saturday night in Cape Town. This play grew out of that horrible event and it's the story of two unlikely people finding they could hardly live without each other. Life is all accident.

Can't remember! Sorry.

Strange you should ask that. I'm one of a small minority of actors who have never trod the boards of the National Theatre – I almost can't believe it myself. And anyway, the National is not really a company. A company is formed for each separate production. Whereas the old RSC really did try to be a company by having three year contracts for all its actors. Peter Hall was determined to forge an ensemble a la Comédie-Française or the Moscow Arts. It doesn't sit happily with English actors, alas.

And you're right to say that the RSC was at its brilliant best in those days with Peter and John Barton and later Trevor Nunn, reaching for those heights. It's rare to find our big productions without a big star name heading it nowadays. But that doesn't mean that the big star productions always work in favour of the play.

There's no doubt in my mind that every single one of the Shakespeare plays we did in those days had their wattage upped by being cast so well.

Funny, somebody suggested I should play Helen just the other day. But I don't think enough time has passed to assess her properly yet. A lot of white participation in the destruction of apartheid has been written out of the general canvas. A certain historical revisionism has been going on but that will change as distance lends a clearer vision to the unfolding of events. In any case, I'm not the right size or shape for Hellie.

Raise the flags! If I tell you that Hilda Lessways in Clayhanger is one of my best memories, and you might be surprised, but it is! I thought Clayhanger was a magnificent maxi series. 26 episodes! The nearest thing to a novel being read out loud every Tuesday. And yes I loved Hilda because she was a contrary little beast beautifully observed by Arnold Bennett. As to your question about the slight modulation in my voice, I confess I don't actually remember but I suppose instinctively if I had to age from pretty young to much older, I need to be younger at the beginning. Hence a lighter modulation.

Well I've answered the TV one. The film one. My best film experience was definitely spending a whole week with that genius Federico Fellini when he made The Boat Sails On. I was there filming the inserts into the main film for a week before they actually started and so I had that man to myself. The guy's a genius. The traffic would stop for him in Rome. And every night we went to the same restaurant with the best food ever!! La padrona – or the cook – turned out to be a very old friend of his from his youth in Bologna and I've never eaten better. A lot of people don't know that Fellini was also a foodie.

Well, thank you for the last comment. Kim Cattrall is a great gal. She had the modesty and the courage – not having had any classical training – to want to try to catch the big one i.e. Cleopatra, and she landed it magnificently. We loved working together. I can't be absolutely sure that she always agreed with me but she had the grace to have a go when I suggested this or that in relation to Cleo. She is a person, and this probably sounds a bit poe-faced but bugger that, of the utmost integrity. And that shows in her work. Integrity always does.

Well Athol is one of the few playwright who really love women. And I guess they are wounded and they are lost but all his characters have a spine of stoicism and lack of self pity which I find very moving. There are some really talented female directors in SA, chief amongst them being Lara Foot and Yaël Farber.

I saw Yaël's Nirbhaya and it was remarkable for broaching a subject which is at the forefront of people's mind what with Angelina Jolie fronting Unesco's war rape initiative and the ever present spectre of rape, horribly at the forefront of most countries. Lara Foot's play was called Tshepang! And that dealt with baby rape of which there's nothing more horrible.

I hate to say that rape is the going subject but it is.

Well look South African theatre is evolving and changing and reacting to the tempers and the temperatures of the time. It's some good and some not so good. I always think there's lots of talent in South Africa and the Royal Court theatre have just done a young writers exercise and have had six young writers from South Africa showing their wares at a young writers fest there. There was some marvellous stuff. What we need is a Royal Court in South Africa. A writers' theatre.

In its day the Othello I directed at the Market Theatre – thereby breaking the British Equity boycott –  unexpectedly dipped into the then South African experience in a really crucial way because, in the highest possible poetry written by any human being, the complete humiliation of a black man was dramatised. And so it's unexpected to find Shakespeare hit the spot. But he did then. He and he always can.

But back to the present, I think that Solomon and Marion, which I did at the Baxter Theatre Studio, and which London will see in October / November at the new Print Room, very much enters the present South African experience. And by that I mean crossing chasms between the races, the genders and the ages. A young black man and an old white woman find common ground.