Curious about what might lie between the two, Peter and I climbed up on to the roof of Clement Freud’s old hat-and-coat room and discovered a tiny oriole window through which we shone a torch, revealing a magical attic-space intersected with twirly iron-work. When the room was converted, the ceiling, of course, came down and the room – so lacking in most of the things that a theatre needs – achieved what a theatre needs more than anything else: a personality.

Cut forward to the autumn of that same year. I was in deep trouble, having opened the Theatre Upstairs with a badly chosen season. This was when Peter gave me the script of Over Gardens Out, which he’d just completed. I remember my intoxication at the grace and simplicity of the dialogue. Quite recently I found my diary of that time, and found that I'd written, on a page of its own, the phrase "the beating heart." What I meant was that Peter's writing had a transparency which led me into his characters' inner lives.