On 28 July 1961 I found myself peering through two glass portholes – an enlargement of the round gig-lamp glasses on my nose – set into the double doors of St George the Martyr’s Hall on Borough High Street in south London, wondering whether my grand determination to become an actor had all been a mistake. I’d left boarding school in Wiltshire early that morning to start rehearsals – a week late, but that had all been agreed since I only had a small part – for Michael Croft’s 1961 National Youth Theatre season in the West End. Two plays had been chosen for his repertoire that I would come to know well over the next fifty years: Richard II and Henry IV Part Two (oddly enough not the sequential Part One, but then Part Two does have more good cameo roles for a big company). Off the train, I’d paused at home long enough to greet my mother and – which seemed as important – to change into my jeans and winklepicker shoes. I think I also wanted to reassure her – for far from the last time – that I’d be all right in the world I was about, albeit as an amateur, to enter. She’d had seven worrying years since I’d become stage-struck, in which her support had never wavered, except for one moment when she sadly confided in her sister that I still hadn’t got over my ‘mania for the stage’. For the subsequent half-century (she died exactly halfway through it, more or less content with the way things had turned out), the reproachful mantra I’ve repeated whenever I’ve felt professionally sorry for myself or worn out has been, I Told My Mother I Could Do It.

Not long before looking through these porthole windows I had, aged sixteen, played Prospero in a school production of The Tempest. The school had acquired for the occasion the magic cloak recently worn by John Gielgud in Peter Brook’s production at Stratford. By now it was a threadbare thing, much hired out since he’d doffed it; however, the exceptionally cunning director of the play – a teacher of German with some of the instincts of an impresario – told me not to worry, it would look terrific under the lights. Convinced, I held my head high; but the cloak worked like a carpet sweeper, its extrusions of wire and jagged gauze efficiently hoovering up whatever was lying about the stage – nails, fluff, wood shavings. Since the theatre requires the willing suspension of disbelief, I stalked through the production, lamb dressed pretty much as mutton, but believing that the mantle of Gielgud had descended on me in more senses than one.

Now, taking in what I could see of the Youth Theatre rehearsal from the other side of the swing doors, I felt this power-investing garment slipping off my shoulders to reveal the pitiful nakedness of my ambition. The startlingly encyclopaedic knowledge of Shakespeare I’d accumulated during my ill-spent teenage years at London’s Old Vic Theatre (I’d even seen two separate productions of Titus Andronicus) would have qualified me to win the £64,000 prize on ITV’s Double Your Money, had I entered rather than staying at home fuming at the inadequate contestant on the box: suddenly it seemed so much idle fancy. What I was hearing and seeing was a great commotion of young men – no women at all – who looked like giants and sounded like the roaring sea. In full throttle were Robin Ellis, John Shrapnel, Ian McShane, Hywel Bennett, David Weston, Richard Hampton, Simon Ward and Martin Jarvis, their unnervingly well-trained young voices braying at each other in what turned out to be the gage-flinging opening scene of Richard II.

Could I go through with this? Should I push the door open, knowing that silence would probably fall as the giants stopped, swung round and looked at me (I who had felt like a giant at school) through thirty sets of unforgiving grown-up eyes; or do I go home to Mother, defeated before I begin? Yes, that would be, by a small margin, worse. You know the answer, but when, a few moments later and after an excruciating introduction by Michael Croft (‘Ah, here’s our public-school boy’), Robin Ellis showed me gently where to stand as the loyal Earl of Salisbury and I took up an appropriate anti-Bolingbroke posture, we not only started a friendship for life, but, dear reader, demonstrated a truth: be nice to the newcomer and he’ll never forget you.

It would be hard to overstate the daring and resolve of Michael Croft’s young company. Set up five years earlier at the end of his teaching career at Alleyn’s School (founded by Shakespeare’s great rival, Edward Alleyn), it had already presented Henry V, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar, done a season at the Queen’s Theatre in the West End as well as at the Lyric Hammersmith, played the Edinburgh Festival, Dartington Hall, Toynbee Hall and the Arts Theatre in Cambridge. It had an impressive overseas portfolio as well – a visit to Paris and tours of Italy and Holland. Croft’s original idea had been altruistic – not to recruit from university or drama school, or in any way prepare actors for professional careers: he used to say he’d take a young man with character and general flair even if he couldn’t act at all.

By now, 1961, the Youth Theatre’s founding principles of involving disadvantaged kids in Shakespeare more for their own benefit than for the finesse of the results had been slightly diluted by the need of those who had gone on to drama school to have a final showcase to secure their first job: hence the clamour and sophistication, not to mention the prototypical leather jackets. The age range was fifteen to twenty-one, with exceptions for young men doing National Service. There were grammar-school and secondary-modern kids, and, very rarely indeed, one or two from public schools.

So three weeks after leaving mine, I was on the stage of the Apollo Theatre in the West End – alone, in a green velvet gown as I recall, and, as I like to think, a gently tightening follow-spot. It’s a little-known fact that the Earl of Salisbury in Richard II has a soliloquy. It follows a brief scene with a Welsh Captain who reports to him that his regiment of soldiers loyal to King Richard has deserted, and he has no choice but to go as well. The noble Earl’s soliloquy that follows may not be of the order of ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’, but it has its moments. Here, in its entirety, it is:

And exit, sadly. I hope, I’m sure vainly, that I wasn’t too slow. Anyway, a West End Wendy before my time, I was on my way.

Once in a while in the Youth Theatre someone farted on stage and everyone laughed. So naturally I laughed too. The Duke of York was awesomely drunk one night, and, little puritan that I was, I didn’t know quite what to think. Still, things were going well. I was to be off to Cambridge in September but first there was a quick trip to Berlin with a few performances of the revived modern-dress Julius Caesar which Croft had premiered the previous year. I played a wheelchair-bound Caius Ligarius, hoisting himself to his feet in his enthusiasm to join the revolutionary cause, and then quick-changed into Cinna the Poet, murdered for his bad verses by a quartet of Teddy boys who looked very much like the newly emerging Beatles.

It was a remarkable trip for a couple of reasons. We were the official British entrants at the Berlin International Festival, even though we weren’t professionals. We were playing at the historic Hebbel Theatre in the Kreuzberg district and staying at the Stuttgarter Hof (not nearly as grand as it is now) on Anhalter Strasse. What made this particular was the fact that the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (the Berlin Wall to you and me) had gone up six weeks earlier and both the theatre and the hotel were less than ten minutes’ walk away. We were warned to stay in the hotel, so of course I crossed into the East without delay with three or four pals, armed with some kind of barely official authorisation, to visit the legendary Berliner Ensemble (we saw a dress rehearsal of Arturo Ui with Ekkehard Schall) – doing my bit for East–West relations by making the terrifying border guards laugh at my passport photo. I was lucky: soon after I left Berlin, a US diplomat, also on a cultural mission – he had tickets for the State Opera – was denied entry to the Eastern sector. As a result of that, US diplomats going into the East took to being accompanied by American Jeeps. To emphasise the point, US tanks then rolled up to just short of Checkpoint Charlie and sat there, gunning their engines; the Russians rolled up an equal number on the other side, and for a moment it looked as if World War Three might break out. Meanwhile Kennedy quietly negotiated with Khrushchev, and one by one the tanks rolled away again. My attempt at conciliation by means of comedy had clearly paved the way for peace.

My time with Michael Croft had been the first part of an unofficial two-stage training, in life as much as acting, to be completed by the time I was twenty-one. I bounced into its second phase with the same abruptness as into the...