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Hall, who asked me to play Anya in The Cherry Orchard . It was to be directed by Michel Saint-Denis, and I had to go to meet Michel at Peter’s house in that little square opposite Harrods. I remember that particularly, because Michel said, ‘Oh, if I’d been looking for Eliza Doolittle my search would stop here,’ so I don’t think that I was his first choice as Anya. But nevertheless I did get the part. The cast included John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Patrick Wymark, Roy Dotrice, Dorothy Tutin, Patience Collier, Patsy Byrne and Ian Holm. It was the end of the Stratford season, which they had all been in, and I hadn’t, so I did feel very much the new girl.
    We rehearsed for eight weeks at Stratford, which was unusually long even at that time, before opening at the Aldwych, which had become the London base for the RSC. Not long after we started rehearsing, Peggy Ashcroft said to me, ‘I have a feeling that you’re going to have a hard time. Michel always picks on someone, just don’t let him see you cry.’ That was when my fondness for Dame Peg started, and for Sir John, too, who came to my rescue at a difficult moment. At the end of the first act Michel used to give notes to everybody, but when he got to me he would just shrug and throw up his hands and sigh, so my confidence, if I had any, just disappeared. Then one day when we were rehearsing in the Conference Hall, now the Swan Theatre, we reached the end of Act I, and Sir John said to me as we exited, ‘Oh, if you’d been doing that for me in one of my productions, I’d have been delighted.’ From that minute I was even more devoted to him. I thought, That’s who I’ll do it for, I’ll just ever so slightly shift the emphasis, and do it for Sir John.
    Apparently the first production of The Cherry Orchard that Michel had seen was by the Moscow Art Theatre, and he kept wanting me to do the same kind of tinkling laugh that the actress playing Anya there had done on her first entrance. He used to pretend that he didn’t understand what I was saying, he kept going, ‘What? What?’ Once we had opened, and the production was a success, I suddenly became his flavour of the month, but it was ever so slightly too late for me by then, after eight weeks of rehearsal misery at Stratford.
    I loved acting with Sir John, who got marvellous notices as Gaev, but somebody said on The Critics programme on the radio that he didn’t feel Gaev was enjoying the caramels enough. So the next night he came on he was enjoying them so much that he completely dried on the line, and then laughed, of course. There is a story that may be apocryphal that somebody said to him in a play, ‘I don’t think you should wear the brown shoes, I think that the black shoes look better.’ Somebody else said, ‘I think the brown shoes are better,’ so he wore one brown and one black shoe. I love that story.
    While I was doing The Cherry Orchard at the Aldwych, Peter asked if I would like to go and do the 1962 season at Stratford, first to play Isabella in Measure for Measure , directed by John Blatchley, and then to be in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , directed by himself, a revival of his original 1959 production, which I had seen with Mary Ure as Titania.
    I enjoyed playing Isabella, with Ian Holm as my brother Claudio, Tom Fleming as the Duke, and Ian Richardson as Lucio, though we only had mixed notices for it. But it was absolutely glorious to be in the Dream , playing Titania to Ian Richardson’s Oberon, and Ian Holm’s Puck. Lila de Nobili designed the most unbelievably exquisite set, which looked like an Elizabethan hall when you went in, and suddenly the lights came on and you saw a forest going right back, with Puck coming running through the trees. It was just magical. I thought then that Ian Richardson was simply the best Oberon there had ever been.
    It was my idea for the fairies all to have those pointed rubber ears, and I had a brilliant wig that had been made in Paris out of