SG: I wonder who those young people are, actually. At the Menier Chocolate Factory there were a lot of young people there, but they also looked pretty middle-class to me.

DJ: Do you think people think going to the theatre is a demanding and possibly a frightening experience? Because, Simon, your plays are incredibly easy to watch and enjoy. They’re not like a sort of test that you have to pass. Because what you’re interested in are the lives of individuals, not necessarily ordinary people I suppose, but nonetheless people with whom it’s easy to identify.

SG: Well, most of my people speak grammatically, and they seem to take trouble with their speech, or at some point in their lives have had trouble taken with their speech, and it means that people really have to listen, I think. If the play’s going to survive the evening, it has to have a fairly listening or attentive audience. I don’t think they appeal, frankly, to anyone outside of a literate middleclass audience. I can’t imagine, for example, taking the play to the outskirts of Liverpool would be a bright move. It would be a disastrous move, actually.