What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

Socrates, after all, could be an intensely annoying man, all the time questioning passers-by until they became exasperated.

Socrates was famously executed for his philosophical and political beliefs. I wondered what would happen if you had a similar character, who was so relentlessly questioning of everything? In a modern society, would we be any more or any less tolerant of that kind of character?

I conceived 'All Is Song' as a modernised, loosely interpreted version of Socrates's life.

One of the most unsettling things about 'Monologue' is its long silences, in which the man sits alone, staring into the middle distance, without grip of his narrative, lost to the past.

The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.