He began talking to them.

“I’m not starting with a reading,” he said. “Readings are okay as far as they go for the major roles, but bit-parts are bit-parts and as far as the Gentlewoman and the Doctor are concerned, once they arrive they are bloody important, but their zeal won’t be set on fire by sitting around waiting for a couple of hours for their entrance.

“Instead, I’m going to invite you to take a hard look at this play and then get on with it. It’s short and it’s faulty. That is to say, it’s full of errors that crept into whatever script was handed to the printers. Shakespeare didn’t write the silly Hecate bits so out she comes. It’s compact and drives quickly to its end. It’s remorseless. I’ve directed it, in other theatres, twice — each time, I may say, successfully and without any signs of bad luck — so I don’t believe in the bad-luck stories associated with it and I hope none of you do either. Or if you do, you’ll keep your ideas to yourselves. ”

He paused long enough to sense a change of awareness in his audience and a quick, instantly repressed, movement of Nina Gaythorne’s hands.

“It’s straightforward,” he said. “I don’t find any major difficulties or contradictions in Macbeth. He is a hypersensitive, morbidly imaginative man beset by an overwhelming ambition. From the moment he commits the murder he starts to disintegrate. Every poetic thought, magnificently expressed, turns sour. His wife knows him better than he knows himself and from the beginning realizes that she must bear the burden, reassure her husband, screw his courage to the sticking-place, jolly him along. In my opinion,” Peregrine said, looking directly at Margaret Mannering, “she’s not an iron monster who can stand up to any amount of hard usage. On the contrary, she’s a sensitive creature who has an iron will and has made a deliberate, evil choice. In the end she never breaks, but she talks and walks in her sleep. Disastrously.”