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they want doing before we go home, please leave it in my dressing room.’ I got there the next day and I couldn’t open the door: they had piled all their clothes up so that I just could not get in.
    When we came back home, the company were asked to go to Yugoslavia with Hamlet and I got the part of Ophelia back. Michael asked me to his office and he said,
    ‘Now, Miss Dench, I think you’ve learnt a lot in six months.’
    ‘I hope so.’
    ‘Well, I think you ought to play Ophelia in Yugoslavia.’
    We played Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana, and the audiences went absolutely mad. The students could not afford to come, so about six or seven of us went off to the university and did as much of the play as we could, just for them, for free. It was so exciting, I felt I played it better because I had watched Barbara play it in America, and I couldn’t copy her performance because I am not like her, but I felt I understood it better.
    If Hamlet had its difficult moments for me, then Measure for Measure was difficult for everybody. The American director Margaret Webster arrived at rehearsal with a broken leg in plaster, which only added to her famously bad temper. She certainly got off on the wrong foot with John Neville, who was playing Angelo. Barbara Jefford was Isabella, a part she had played at Stratford opposite John Gielgud, and on that very first day Margaret Webster turned to Barbara and asked her, ‘I wonder what it was that made Sir John so wonderful as Angelo?’ right in front of John.
    At that time there was no Equity ruling about when a rehearsal had to stop, so whenever they were off everyone used to go to the wonderful old pub next door (now known as Bar Central). John used to lean against the door at half-past five, and when the door was opened he would fall on the floor and say, ‘Sorry I’m late.’ At the Technical Run there was a lot of stopping and starting, and at one point John came on to this vast timber set, well the worse for wear, struck a match and said, ‘I name this ship Disaster .’ Barry Kay was the designer, and Margaret Webster once gave him a terrible dressing-down. I felt so sorry for him; she screamed at him, and a lot of his costume designs were cut.
    A Midsummer Night’s Dream was much more fun, directed by Michael Benthall. To play Bottom, he cast the comedian Frankie Howerd, who was wary of the Shakespearean actors he was joining. He was lovely, and wonderful in the part, but he was a bit mean, and would never buy a drink for anybody, always managing to be the last one in the pub. All the actors playing the mechanicals very much stuck together, and had a dressing room upstairs whilst he was in Dressing Room One. Once when they were told to break for lunch they all came down and waited on the bend of the stairs until he came out. When he did, he glanced up and saw them, and along the corridor he suddenly stopped to do his shoelace up, so they all stopped as well. He said, ‘What’s wrong with you lot?’ They said, ‘We’re waiting for you to tie your shoe and go in and buy us a drink at last.’
    Another imaginative piece of Michael’s off-beat casting was Tommy Steele as Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer . I think the pop star was just as scared as the comedian of sharing a stage with classical actors, but his fans in the audience were quite restless until he came on. I still have the letter which one of them wrote to Tommy Steele during the run, which said:
    Dear Mr Steele , My wife and I are coming to see She Stoops to Conquer on Friday , and as it’s my wife’s birthday would you mind singing ‘ Little White Bull’?
    The stage doorkeeper, Ernie Davis, liked this letter so much that he asked Tommy for it, and now I have it.
    Twelfth Night was also great fun to play, especially with John Neville as Aguecheek, Derek Godfrey as Feste, and Paul Daneman as Sir Toby Belch. In the early rehearsals I began by playing Maria without an accent, and then one day Michael