“What has occurred to me is that I didn’t understand the play very much,” he said in his cramped dressing room in the Walter Kerr Theatre, where he makes a cup of tea.

“It’s a masterpiece so you can understand one element of it but not another. So I think I understood one element of it as a 15-year-old and now as a 35-year-old you see things very differently. It’s way more complicated than I remember it.”