This was my first job. A notice went up at RADA announcing auditions for the launch of an ambitious project to cover the entire canon of Shakespeare plays over five years. I wrote and asked to be listed. They saw me – I think I have the audition pieces somewhere… probably a bit of Cloten in Cymbeline and a comic poem – and I got in. RADA was mildly shaken. For reasons which are clear if you dip into my first Vol they assumed I was headed for weekly rep, possibly to stage manage.
To play on the stage of the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern – which is how the Old Vic started – where Emma Cons and her niece Lillian Baylis had laboured to bring opera and theatre to… EVERYONE, was a thrilling prospect.
These programmes look curiously spartan and restrained. But open them and you would discover – Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Michael Hordern and Fay Compton. The promise of a year on stage in their company at this historic palace of culture was both humbling and exhilarating.
