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Benthall asked me if I could play it in anything else. I said, ‘Yes, I could play it in Yorkshire’, which I had heard often enough when I was growing up, and it seemed to fit the character very well. We had a lovely time doing it, and it is one of my favourite plays; I have done it twice more since then.
    Michael Benthall was never really given the credit that was his due for his achievements at the Old Vic, nobody has written about him in the way he should have been written about. He was not perhaps the greatest director, but he had a wonderful eye as an impresario in choosing a company. In Richard Burton and John Neville he had the precursors of the Beatles and Johnnie Ray, the audiences used to go mad when they came on, and his courage in casting Frankie Howerd and Tommy Steele paid off at the box office. I owed Michael a lot, including the chance to play Juliet, which I am pretty sure he suggested to Franco Zeffirelli, to whom he gave his first opportunity to direct Shakespeare. John Stride was cast as Romeo, and Alec McCowen as Mercutio. Nobody could remember when it had last been cast with actors so young: we were all in our early twenties.
    Franco was quite unlike any other director I had ever worked for. I was used to them being down in the stalls, and asking you to make a certain move from out there. He rehearsed the scenes with Romeo and Juliet separately from the rest of the cast, and would tell us what to do, and you would be doing it, and suddenly he would be doing it beside you, which was a bit off-putting, because he was better than either of us. He put a fantastic passion into it, and the whole production had a hot Italian atmosphere about it, using dry ice to create what looked like a heat haze, people putting towels and sheets out over balconies, the boys lying asleep on the fountain – it looked absolutely beautiful. But Edith Evans didn’t like it because, she said, we all looked so dirty.
    I did not get very good notices for that, at least at first, and most of the critics hated it; only Kenneth Tynan raved about the production in the Observer , and I can still remember thinking, Bless him. We had all been dismayed by the overnight reviews, but Michael was like a rock. He called us all together, and told us to take no notice of critics without any vision. ‘Go on, and listen to your hearts,’ he said. So we did, and audiences flocked to it. We had the longest run of the play for ages – over 120 performances.
    My parents came to everything I did at the Old Vic, and it was during this run that Daddy famously got so carried away when I cried out to Peggy Mount, ‘Where are my father and my mother, Nurse?’ that he called out from the stalls, ‘Here we are, darling, in row H.’ When I tell that story now, hardly anyone believes me, but I do assure you that it is true.
    Then we took it to Venice as part of the Biennale, and played at the beautiful old Fenice Theatre, which years later sadly burnt down. We went up an hour and a half late, because of a gondola crush. Franco’s relations came round in the interval and drank all the champagne; they had quite a party before they went off, leaving us to get on with the second part of the story. The curtain came down at a quarter past one in the morning, but it was a glorious experience, and those were the final performances I did of Romeo and Juliet , a pretty romantic place to play my last night with that production. The rest of the company went on to Turin, then toured at home before taking it to Broadway, but I didn’t go with them because I was leaving the Old Vic to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. I thought that Franco would never forgive me for not going to America with it. Indeed, he was so angry that he wouldn’t speak to me. I had to wait forty years before we worked together again.

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From Stratford to Oxford via West Africa
    1961-1965

 
    I JOINED THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE Company for the first time in 1961 at the invitation of Peter