As a kid I was fortunate enough to have had two English teachers who loved Shakespeare and brought him to life in the classroom. They also marched us off to the cinema to see the Olivier Shakespeare movies—Hamlet, Henry V and Richard III—and to the Maitland town hall to see any touring Shakespeare show. These were severely reduced in scale and the sets and costumes were pretty tacky, but it was great to see actors on stage bringing to life the lines we were struggling over in the classroom.

When I was about to graduate from high school my English teacher informed me and my parents that my destiny was clear—I was to go to university and then become an actor. My parents were rightly apprehensive about the latter, but hoped (in vain) that an arts degree might offer some guarantee against penury.

My four years at Sydney Uni (I took an Honours degree in English) were mainly about growing up and committing the usual youthful indiscretions and doing a lot of acting, in everything from Revue to Shakespeare—but of course it was the latter which was my main focus and the subject of my rather humdrum thesis.

On leaving Sydney Uni in 1962 I announced my arrival on the theatre scene by hiring the Genesian Theatre in Kent Street for a few nights and presenting a one-man show called This Sceptr’d Isle, a quick gallop through Shakespeare’s history plays with myself providing the narrative and running commentary, peppered with all the choicest monologues of Richard II, Henry V, Richard III et al., assisted by a few props, cloaks and crowns.

It was a cheeky thing to do but it got a good notice in the Sydney Morning Herald and opened an important door for me: I was invited to join the newly formed Old Tote Theatre Company and within a few months found myself playing Hamlet, followed some six months later by Henry V in a circus tent at the Adelaide Festival. It was a dream run, much enhanced by my encounter with Anna Volska, the other ‘juvenile’ in the company. We fell in love immediately and are still going strong nearly fifty years later.

The downside was that I had peaked too early—where do you go after Henry V and Hamlet? And I had begun to realise my inadequacies. I had never had an acting lesson and had underestimated the vocal strain of playing Henry V eight times a week in a circus tent.

A British Council Scholarship took me to England and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1964 and gave me the opportunity to nip up to London at weekends and camp outside the Old Vic in Waterloo Road overnight to get tickets to see Olivier perform. I saw his Othello four times and half a dozen other of his late great roles.

But the best was yet to come. I had only been at Bristol Old Vic for a few months when its principal, Nat Brenner, sent me to audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. This was the beginning of my real apprenticeship over the next five years.

I remember very clearly my excitement on first walking into the foyer of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Whenever I go back there, I sniff the air and all that excitement comes rushing back to me. But for my first six months in the company I wasn’t to set foot on stage. I had been assigned to a new experimental studio group whose task it was to explore new ways of performing Shakespeare under the tutelage of the renowned old French director Michel Saint-Denis.

To this day I cannot figure out the real purpose of that studio group. Maybe the RSC had had a grant or windfall and were obliged to spend it on something; maybe they were stuck with Michel on contract and had to find something for him to do. Anyway, there were ten of us bright young things stuck in this old house on the river, just beyond the church. We were all madly ambitious and desperate to prove ourselves. We did voice and movement classes, a good deal of rather old-fashioned mask work with Michel (that was his specialty) and some verse analysis with John Barton, the ultimate pedagogue. After six months we were drafted into the main company as walk-ons, bit players and understudies. It was not a particularly happy group—too much frustration, too many egos and rivalries, resulting in some heavy drinking and a few punch-ups. I don’t know what’s happened to most of them forty years on; Frances de la Tour is the only one I see still working. But to be in some of those productions and working with some of those people was the great learning experience of my life. There were flops too—some really shonky productions and a few stodgy ones—but even they taught me something.

The first director I worked with was John Schlesinger, a movie director brought in to direct the little-known Timon of Athens with Paul Scofield. I didn’t find Schlesinger a pleasant man, maybe because his direction to the extras was: ‘You’re just heaps of shit . . . sit on the side of the stage and do nothing.’ The production was not a good one, but I was able to bask in the aura of Scofield and watch his performance from the wings every moment that I was off stage. His remarkable voice, so mellow, at times so craggy and unpredictable in cadence, was matched by a physical ease and solemnity. It was a joy to listen to him rehearse, testing every phrase over and over, wrestling with its meaning, with torturous slides in pitch and emphasis. He was also one of the most sweet-natured and courteous people I’ve ever met, possessed of a calm, natural dignity—qualities I associate with our own Ron Haddrick. I had the great pleasure and privilege of working with Scofield later in Peter Hall’s Macbeth and I understudied him in Gogol’s The Government Inspector. He had that ability, which you don’t come across much these days, to make you aware of the richness and music of language. That musicality goes in and out of favour. At present it doesn’t accord with the sort of naturalism we’re used to on the screen. But you still get it occasionally in actors who’ve done the classics. Daniel Day-Lewis for instance, in There Will Be Blood, has a vocal presence that is idiosyncratic and disconcerting. It is a major part of that remarkable characterisation.

Ian Richardson was nearing his zenith at this time and epitomised the vocal timbre and articulation that was a hallmark of the RSC. He had a ringing tenor and great command of the architecture of language that resulted in stunning clarity. With him on a bad day, and in lesser actors, it could tip into affectation and a display of technique for its own sake.

His opposite was the physically diminutive Ian Holm, who puzzled everybody by not seeming to act at all, yet he performed heroic roles like Romeo and Henry V with enormous power and heart-rending effect. His apparent nonchalance and introversion were a cloak for an intelligent, carefully wrought technique.

In my time at the RSC I played Rosencrantz in Peter Hall’s Hamlet with Glenda Jackson giving a strident and forceful Ophelia who seemed pretty dotty well before the Mad Scene. I played alongside the warm and sexy Diana Rigg in a colourful but shallow Twelfth Night directed by Clifford Williams. David Warner was a gangling beanpole Aguecheek dressed in garish yellow. (The pay-off came when Aguecheek is told, after months of wooing Olivia, ‘Yellow is a colour she can’t abide.’) Ian Holm (as Malvolio) appeared as a grumpy pint-sized Shakespeare. I’m not sure why—maybe the resemblance was accidental.

Judi Dench was in the company too. I never got the chance to work with her, but I shared a dressing room with her brother Jeffrey for a while. One evening Jeffrey came in from a day’s cycling around the Stratford countryside. He had stopped to chat to two old gaffers who were trimming hedges. When asked what they were doing one explained: ‘I rough-hew them and he shapes their ends.’ Suddenly the line from Hamlet sprang out with new significance:

There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

Who else but a Warwickshire country man would have thought of that image? And how amazing to find the expression still in the vernacular four hundred years later.

As a director, the shabby, shaggy and increasingly eccentric John Barton was awesomely knowledgeable about text, structure and meaning. His productions could be ponderous; I saw the opening night of his Love’s Labour’s Lost, which was a heavy, plodding affair. But by the end of the season, once the actors had digested all the footnotes, and invested it with lightness and buoyancy, it was one of the richest, most multi-layered Shakespeares I’ve seen. And his Twelfth Night with Judi Dench as Viola and Donald Sinden as Malvolio was a precious gem. Australians were lucky that it toured here in 1970.

Peter Hall’s preoccupation (which, naturally enough, became my own for some time after) was to stress the timeliness, the political and social relevance of the plays, to rescue them from the glamorous picture-book representations of the previous generation. This approach was widely successful in the Wars of the Roses cycle he directed with Barton in the early 1960s.

Looking back on it now, those productions don’t seem that radical, but they did then. The costumes were still what you’d call ‘period’—i.e. medieval. But they were simplified, toned down in colour, toughened up with leather and metal, broken down with stains and fake mud. Never pretty or romantic. The acting was tough and forceful. Heroics gave way to brutal cynicism.

Hall took something of the same approach with his Hamlet in 1966 with relative newcomer David Warner, who had grabbed the headlines with his Henry VI. Hall stressed the black comedy and existentialist elements in the play. Warner’s Hamlet, a shambling, pimply, grouchy university student trailing a long scarf, had massive appeal for the under-twenty-fives, who camped outside the theatre in the hope of buying tickets. It’s a production that would raise few eyebrows today, but critical reaction at the time was full of outrage. ‘No! This will not DO!’ bellowed one critic. What a very English way of putting it. Hall’s thinking, while modern, was hardly revolutionary. His idea of a contemporary look for Hamlet was to put all the courtiers in traditional Tudor garments, but to give them a pinstripe—a whiff of Whitehall. It was an intelligent but very subtle statement.

Peter Brook was the real radical and I don’t think his colleagues fully understood or appreciated what he was up to. After the first preview of his groundbreaking Midsummer Night’s Dream Hall is said to have gone up to him, patted his back in commiseration, and said: ‘Well, don’t feel bad—you did your best.’ I saw a lot of Brook’s work while I was in the company—his spectacular Marat/Sade at the Aldwych, along with his disturbing anti–Vietnam War piece, U.S. At the National I saw his Senecan Oedipus with Sir John Gielgud—an austere and classical rendition which erupted at the end with a jazz band cavorting through the audience sporting rubber phalluses and playing ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’.

I got the chance to work with Brook only once, in a staged reading of a piece called The Investigation, a transcript of the trials of Nazi war criminals. But in the late 1970s, when my partners and I were running the Nimrod, we brought his company from Paris to Sydney to present Ubu Roi, The Ik and Conference of the Birds. Now in his eighties, Brook is necessarily slowing down a little, but the work that I saw, along with his many writings, remains inspiring and challenging. His work has become increasingly spare and simple as he seeks to answer the question: ‘What is the very least I need to create a piece of theatre?’ In this regard he learned a lot from his sojourn in Africa, travelling with his small troupe (including Helen Mirren and Bruce Myers) to the most remote villages. Upon arrival, they would spread a carpet on the ground and sit around it. Soon the whole village would have gathered out of curiosity. Then someone would place a random object like a cardboard box or pair of shoes in the middle of the carpet and the actors would improvise a story around it: theatre at its most pure and simple. More recent Brook productions of Carmen, Don Giovanni and Hamlet have all pursued this quest to strip away the accretia, the inessentials, to get to the guts of a piece, its vital motor. Hence Brook continues to be a source of inspiration to me. It’s so easy to get caught up in the peripheral things when you’re acting or directing—being too literal, falling back on cliché without even realising you’re doing it—instead of reinventing the piece in your head, seeing it for the first time.

Towards the end of my time with the RSC, when Anna and I had decided to return to Australia, Peter Hall took over the National and anointed the young Trevor Nunn as his successor at the RSC. Trevor had hitherto been only an assistant director but announced his arrival with a stunning production of The Revenger’s Tragedy and a cast of young recruits—Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, Alan Howard and Helen Mirren among them. This was the beginning of an exciting new wave at the RSC, with a more abstract and contemporary approach to design and staging. But by this time I was heading for home. I did feel some pangs of loss and regret in leaving England and the RSC—it had been a most extraordinary experience and Australia offered a very uncertain future. In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.