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went on to become the compiler of this unique dictionary of theatrical quotations – and my wife. Since we first met at that audition back on 6 June 1968, Michèle and I have had many theatrical adventures together. When that same year she played Viola in a student production of Twelfth Night, I played the Sea Captain. (Years later, I played the part again, with my daughter-in-law, the American actress Kosha Engler, as Viola.) After leaving university, and both embarking on careers in broadcasting and publishing, Michèle and I returned to Oxford in the mid-1970s when I was appointed Artistic Director of the Oxford Theatre Festival (based at the Oxford Playhouse and the New Theatre, Oxford) and we staged a series of plays with a distinguished company that included Michael Redgrave, Celia Johnson, Ian Carmichael, Sinead Cusack and Charles Dance among many others. Tom Baker (before he became Dr Who) played Oscar Wilde for us. Samuel Beckett told me I couldn’t put on a musical version of Waiting for Godot, but could stage the first revival of his play so long as his friend Patrick Magee directed it. Michèle was on hand to help in whatever capacity was required. (She has not forgotten working through the night, painting the set for our production of Saint Joan when she was pregnant with our first-born who would become Benet Brandreth QC, barrister, rhetoric coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company and occasional actor: he starred in a production of Hamlet in London last year. I played his father. His wife Kosha Engler played his mother and Ophelia. We like to mix it up a bit, as well as keep it in the family.) At the Oxford Theatre Festival my associate artistic viii
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director was an actor called Noel Davis. He went on to become a leading casting director in the film industry – working notably on the films of the celebrated director John Schlesinger – but Michèle and I remember him best as the funniest man we ever knew. Nobody could tell a story quite like Noel Davis. His real first name was Edgar, but when he left the merchant navy to become an actor he changed it to Noel in honour of the great man of twentieth-century British theatre, Sir Noël Coward. Our Noel knew all the Coward stories – and all the Laurence Olivier stories and all the Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs Patrick Campbell and Tallulah Bankhead stories too. He was a walking encyclopaedia of theatre lore. It was Noel’s stories that inspired Michèle to compile this collection of theatrical quotations. Read this book and I reckon you get the essence of theatre. It’s a veritable A-to-Z of drama, from Aristotle and Aristophanes to Ziegfeld and Zeffirelli. It contains all the great lines you would expect to find in an anthology of its kind, as well as lots of surprises and lines you won’t find elsewhere. It features all the greats – from Burbage to Branagh, from Oscar Wilde to Orson Welles, from Dame Ellen Terry to Dame Judi Dench – and touches, both wittily and illuminatingly, on every aspect of theatre life, front-stage and back, from the horrors of the first audition to the horrors of the opening night, from the nature of star quality to the reality of stage fright. Over the years Michèle and I have been involved in every kind of theatrical venture. We have had hits (five West End shows) – and flops (we don’t talk about those). As ix

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went on to become the compiler of this unique dictionary of theatrical quotations – and my wife.

Since we first met at that audition back on 6 June 1968, Michèle and I have had many theatrical adventures together. When that same year she played Viola in a student production of Twelfth Night, I played the Sea Captain. (Years later, I played the part again, with my daughter-in-law, the American actress Kosha Engler, as Viola.) After leaving university, and both embarking on careers in broadcasting and publishing, Michèle and I returned to Oxford in the mid-1970s when I was appointed Artistic Director of the Oxford Theatre Festival (based at the Oxford Playhouse and the New Theatre, Oxford) and we staged a series of plays with a distinguished company that included Michael Redgrave, Celia Johnson, Ian Carmichael, Sinead Cusack and Charles Dance among many others. Tom Baker (before he became Dr Who) played Oscar Wilde for us. Samuel Beckett told me I couldn’t put on a musical version of Waiting for Godot, but could stage the first revival of his play so long as his friend Patrick Magee directed it. Michèle was on hand to help in whatever capacity was required. (She has not forgotten working through the night, painting the set for our production of Saint Joan when she was pregnant with our first-born who would become Benet Brandreth QC, barrister, rhetoric coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company and occasional actor: he starred in a production of Hamlet in London last year. I played his father. His wife Kosha Engler played his mother and Ophelia. We like to mix it up a bit, as well as keep it in the family.)

At the Oxford Theatre Festival my associate artistic viii

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