I am so pleased you have made the time to tune in: of course, the moment it becomes practical to revamp my website I am flung into rehearsal and should not be dreaming of talking to you! Still, I was never good at being ruthless, though if ever a short rehearsal period was worth being placed ruthlessly on the top of life’s agenda it is the current preparation of Stoppard’s brilliant Artist Descending a Staircase.

One of the many beginnings to my day is the walk through the spectacularly reclaimed 1868 St Pancras Station on my way to the spectacularly dreadful, cold and dingy rehearsal room in Pentonville Road. One wall of the room has a rehearsal mirror such as dancers use. A previous rehearser, in his or her frustration, has tried to defenestrate themselves through it, and the resultant shards are held together by black gaffer tape. Some years ago, in an even grottier rehearsal room not far from this dismal space, and more in anger than despair, I hurled a coffee mug into the corner where it shattered. A whole year later, an actress who was working in the same room, when I told her of this act of vandalism, said: ‘The pieces are still there!’

As an actor, one hopes to leave happier evidence in one’s wake, and to that end I must break off to con my magical lines. What a chore; yet what a privilege to be able to see beyond the shattered glass and the unbroken sky-blue wrought-iron arch of St Pancras to the France of 1914, the Café Voltaire in Zurich, my young self being played by Max Irons, and to be speaking as my old self words by Tom Stoppard, the author I encountered for the first time in an Old Vic rehearsal room forty-two years ago.

Edward Petherbridge
10 November 2009