PETER HALL interviewed by TERRY COLEMAN

... it seemed to me that the time had come to slip in an intelligent question about crossroads, and I was deeply disappointed when he said he had none to offer. Well then, I said, how old had he been before he realised he was mortal. He said he had been 35.
"It really was the mature realisation that whatever we do it is really bloody pointless, when it comes down to it..."
I have known Peter Hall vaguely for years. We have chatted quite often, though I have never known him more than slightly. All the same, it does come as a surprise to hear him talking about realising that everything was bloody pointless. I'm not sure what he means by it, but I am sure that it should not be magnified into anything like despair. Perhaps, having done so much, he has the feeling that there isn't much left to do in the theatre ... I would guess that when he talks about pointlessness, he is really just saying, in other words, that things are ephemeral. He firmly believes this. He says he would not like to see again anything that he has done... He says, "I don't keep anything of the past. I have no photographs, I don't have anything, I think mainly, I belong to an ephemeral art ... I like that."

OWNERS. CARYL CHURCHILL interviewed by JOHN HALL

"this play," says Miss Churchill, "is about the different ways of seeing things close to you - about the systems people set up for making what they do seem perfectly acceptable and normal when, if you take those actions out of the context that makes them seem normal and acceptable, they're anything but that. For instance we accept as part of the pattern of everyday life the fact that old houses are bought up by certain people and developed. We put their activity in the context of a regular system of events. When I attempt to look at property development in the play from a slightly shifted angle, when I disturb the regular context, then I hope we can see this sort of activity more clearly for what it is - it becomes more a question of whether you think of people as things as important as yourself, with feelings, or as objects to be dealt with. The fact that sexual roles may be reversed in the play - the property developer is a woman - is nothing to do with sexual equality; it's simply a means of showing up the positions the characters are in for reasons other than that of their sex.
The owners of the title are concerned with various types of ownership.