David's son Matthew-as his father's manager, knowing only too well how much they had at stake in the production-grabbed David's hand hard and said gruffly, “Damn. Well done, Dad.” And David wanted to warm to those words and to what they implied, a firm withdrawal of the initial doubts that Matthew had expressed when told of his father's intention to turn Shakespeare's greatest tragedy into his own musical triumph. “You're sure you want to do this?” he'd asked, and the rest of his remarks had remained unspoken: Aren't you setting yourself up for a final deadly fall?

He was indeed, David had confirmed at the time, if only to himself. But what other option did he really have than to try to restore his name as an artist?

He'd managed to do just that: Not only were the audience on their feet, not only were the cast members ecstatically applauding him from the stage, but the critics-whose seat numbers he had memorised, “the better to blow them up,” Matthew had noted sardonically-were also standing, making no move to depart, and joining in the sort of approbation that David had come to fear was as lost to him as was Michael Chandler.

That approbation only grew in the ensuing hours. At the opening night party at the Dorchester, in a ballroom creatively converted into Elsinore Castle, David stood at his wife's side, at the end of a receiving line comprising the production's leading actors. Along that line stepped London's foremost glitterati: Stars of stage and screen gushed over their colleagues and privately gnashed their teeth to conceal their envy; celebrities from all walks of life pronounced King-Ryder Productions’ Hamlet everything from “top notch” and “just fab, darling” to “kept me on the absolute edge of my seat;” It girls and Sloanes-slinkily attired, displaying an astonishing degree of cleavage, and famous either for being famous or for having famous parents-declared that “someone finally made Shakespeare fun”; representatives from that notable drain on the nation's imagination and economy-the Royal Family-offered their best wishes for success.