Dave was presiding over an intermission bar selling soft drinks and candy. He had a dozen friends serving as fast as they could. Cameron was impressed: he had never seen school pupils work so hard. “Did you give them pep pills?” he asked Dave as he got a glass of cherry pop.

“Nope,” said Dave. “Just twenty percent commission on everything they sell.”

Cameron was hoping Evie might come and talk to her family during the intermission, but she still had not appeared when the bell rang for the second half, and he returned to his seat, disappointed but eager to see what she would do next.

Hamlet improved when he had to badger Ophelia with dirty jokes in front of everyone. Perhaps it came naturally to the actor, Cameron thought unkindly. Ophelia’s embarrassment and distress increased until it bordered on hysteria.

But it was her mad scene that brought the house down.

She entered looking like an inmate of an asylum, in a stained and torn nightdress of thin cotton that reached only to midthigh. So far from being pitiable, she was jeering and aggressive, like a drunk whore on the street. When she said: “The owl was a baker’s daughter,” a sentence that in Cameron’s opinion meant nothing at all, she made it sound like a vile taunt.

Cameron heard his mother murmur to his father: “I can’t believe that girl is only fifteen.”

On the line “Young men may do it if they come to it, by cock they are to blame,” Ophelia made a grab for the king’s genitals that provoked a nervous titter from the audience.

Then came a sudden change. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and her voice sank almost to a whisper as she spoke of her dead father. The audience fell silent. She was a child again as she said: “I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him in the cold ground.”

Cameron wanted to cry too.

Then she rolled her eyes, staggered, and cackled like an old witch. “Come, my coach!” she cried insanely. She put both hands to the neckline of her dress and ripped it down the front. The audience gasped. “Good night, ladies!” she cried, letting the garment fall to the floor. Stark naked, she cried: “Good night, good night, good night!” Then she ran off.

After that the play was dead. The gravedigger was not funny and the sword fight at the end so artificial as to be boring. Cameron could think of nothing but the naked Ophelia raving at the front of the stage, her small breasts proud, the hair at her groin a flaming auburn; a beautiful girl driven insane. He guessed every man in the audience felt the same. No one cared about Hamlet.

At the curtain call the biggest applause was for Evie. But the head teacher did not come onstage to offer the lavish praise and extensive thanks normally given to the most hopeless of amateur dramatic productions.

As they left the hall, everyone looked at Evie’s family. Daisy chatted brightly to other parents, putting a brave face on it. Lloyd, in a severe dark-gray suit with a waistcoat, said nothing but looked grim. Evie’s grandmother, Eth Leckwith, smiled faintly: perhaps she had reservations, but she was not going to complain.