Director Dominic Hill was invited to Iran with his production of Shakespeare. It’s been 25 years since the Bard was performed in Tehran. “This reverent attitude towards our national playwright was to crop up again and again during the many interviews I had with journalists and critics. The Persians, as they call themselves, are a cultured, strongly opinioned, passionate people – one mention that I had a degree in English literature and I was treated to a 30-minute lecture on the great Persian poets. Shakespeare is up there with them, and therefore to produce him in modern dress seemed, to the intellectuals and directors I spoke to, incomprehensible, insulting and doomed to failure.”