I LIKE my Sundays as easy as possible. If I'm in production, directing a play, then it's my only day off and I keep activity to a minimum. I've never been any good at sleeping late, so my idea of a big lie-in is to stay in bed until 10. I have a great love of good food, so my ideal Sunday would involve a serious breakfast and a serious lunch. You could say that my Sunday is based around eating and drinking, and I hate having that interfered with, whether by work or anything else.

Breakfast is always at home with my partner, Maeve. If you go out for breakfast you have to get washed and dressed and all the other tedious boring things that you have to do every other day of the week. Lunch is at home too, although perhaps it's more like dinner - we wouldn't eat until around five or six.

Often we have people over - if we entertain then it's most likely that we do it on a Sunday. I have a fondness for fine wines and inevitably, if I'm not working the next day, I have rather more than I should.

I like to cook, although I'm frustrated by the size of the kitchen in the apartment. I spent seven years as a restaurant critic and I like to experiment with food and try out new ideas.

When I ate an expensive meal that I thought wasn't very good, I used to buy the ingredients and see if I could do better at home. If I succeeded, they'd get a bad review.

I used to be a big Sunday paper reader but I tend to get my news online now - it's cheaper and easier to filter out the rubbish. I'm sick of the way celebrities take precedence over international events in so many papers. Sometimes Maeve insists, though, and I spend Monday morning collecting bits of newsprint from all over the apartment.

Sometimes work encroaches on my Sundays, as the opening of a show draws near. Technical rehearsals, where the show is put into the theatre, and I'm working as director with the crew rather than the cast, usually happen on a Sunday, as it's the only day the theatre is empty.

At the moment we're touring with a production of Othello. We started in Waterford, then went to Limerick and we'll be in Galway and at the Helix.

It's my second time to direct the play. It's Shakespeare's greatest love story - Romeo and Juliet's about two horny teenagers, whereas here the story is about a mature man who marries a younger woman of higher social standing - 'He loves not wisely but too well.'

Othello is black and she's the only person who doesn't see his colour. So it's very modern in terms of the issues it addresses - racism, love, jealousy and hatred. It's the stuff of EastEnders - pure soap.

We've set the play in the 1930s in an indeterminate colonial location, on a military base. Johnny Lee Davenport plays Othello, Simon O'Gorman is Iago, and Desdemona is played by Maeve Fitzgerald in her first major role. It's heartbreakingly beautiful and worth giving up a couple of Sundays for.

'Othello' is at The Helix, Dublin from 13 February to 9 March and at the Town Hall, Galway from 12-15 March.