‘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-point, 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.’

Maggie leant forward, her hands clasped, her eyes brilliantly fixed on his face. She gave him a little series of nods. At the moment, at least, she believed him.

‘And she’s as sexy as hell,’ he added. ‘She uses it. Up to the hilt.’

He went on. The witches, he said, must be completely accepted. The play was written in James I’s time at his request. James I believed in witches. In their power and their malignancy. ‘Let us show you,’ said Peregrine, ‘what I mean. Jeremy, can you?’

Blackout, and there were the drawings, needle-sharp in their focused lights.

‘You see the first one,’ Peregrine said. ‘That’s what we’ll go up on, my dears. A gallows with its victim, picked clean by the witches. They’ll drop down from it and dance widdershins round it. Thunder and lightning. Caterwauls. The lot. Only a few seconds and then they’ll leap up and we’ll see them in mid-air. Blackout. They’ll fall behind the high rostrum on to a pile of mattresses. Gallows away. Pipers. Lighted torches and we’re off.’

Well, he thought, I’ve got them. For the moment. They’re caught. And that’s all one can hope for. He went through the rest of the cast, noting how economically the play was written and how completely the inherent difficulty of holding the interest in a character as seemingly weak as Macbeth was overcome.

‘Weak?’ asked Dougal Macdougal. ‘You think him weak, do you?’

‘Weak in respect of this one monstrous thing he feels himself drawn towards doing. He’s a most successful soldier. You may say “larger than life”. He “takes the stage”, cuts a superb figure. The King has promised he will continue to shower favours upon him. Everything is as rosy as can be. And yet – and yet –’

‘His wife?’ Dougal suggested. ‘And the witches!’