‘Five minutes, please! Five minutes, please!’ It was the plaintive echoing voice of the callboy.

Bella looked at herself in the mirror, her smooth, young face belying the torrent of nerves bubbling inside her. Then she sat down on the faded velvet sofa with the broken leg in the corner of the room and waited, clasping her hands in her lap to stop them shaking.

‘Beginners, please! Beginners, please!’ The sad echoing voice passed her door again.

Rosie, who didn’t come on until later, was doing the crossword. Bella took one more look round the dressing-room. Even with its bare floor and blacked-out windows, it seemed friendly and familiar compared with the strange brightly lit world she was about to enter.

‘Good luck,’ said Rosie, as she went out of the door. ‘Give Freddie a big kiss.’

They stood waiting by the open door under a faded orange bulb — Brabantio, Cassio and herself. Wesley Barrington, who was playing Othello, stood by himself, a huge handsome black man, six and a half feet tall, as nervous as a cat, pacing up and down, murmuring his lines like an imprecation.

The three of them left her. Help me to make it, she prayed.

Othello was speaking now in his beautiful measured voice: ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors.’

In a moment she would be on. Iago came to collect her.

‘Come on, beauty,’ he whispered. ‘Keep your chin up.’

It had begun. She was on. Looking round the stage, beautiful, gentle, a little shy. ‘I do perceive here a divided duty,’ she said slowly.

She was off, then on again, flirting a little with Cassio, and then Othello was on again. Here, where she found life a thousand times more real than in the real world, she had words to express her emotions.

But all too soon it was over. The appalling murder scene was ended and the play had spent its brief but all too vivid life.