London is full of anti-immigrant rioting. Will looks forward to an age when such sentiments are long-gone, but in the meantime he and the players plan to do their bit to help those worse off than themselves with a fund-raising charity gala night. "Inflated Pig's Bladder Day" is a triumph.

As it happens Will's newest play, The Merchant of Venice, is also about an oppressed outsider. But who will play the ground-breaking character of Shylock? Step forward the greatest actor of the age, Wolf Hall, a man with amazing stage presence and some rather controversial theories about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays...