Emily’s heart thumped. Thud, thud, thud. A faint, wailing cry, a gust of crying wind and the curtain rose.

There are times – rare but unmistakable – in the theatre when, at rehearsal, the play flashes up into a life of its own and attains a reality so vivid that everything else fades into threadbare inconsequence. These startling transformations happen when the play is over halfway to achievement: the actors are not in costume, the staging is still bare bones. Nothing intervenes between the characters and their projection into the void. This was such a day.

Emily felt she was seeing Macbeth for the first time. She was constantly taken by surprise. Perfect. Wonderful. Terrible, she thought.

Duncan arrived at the castle. The sound of wings fluttering in the evening air. Peaceful. Then the squeal of pipes, the rumble of the great doors, the opening and the assembly of servants. Seyton. Lady Macbeth a scarlet figure at the top of the stairs. Don’t go in, don’t go in.

But she welcomed him. They all went in and the doors rumbled and closed on them.

Afterwards Emily could not remember if the sounds Shakespeare introduces were actually heard; the cricket, the owl, the usual domestic sounds that continue in an old house when the guests are all asleep in bed. The other ambiguous sounds the Macbeths think they hear…

It was accomplished. The ‘terrible imaginings’ were real, now, and they went to wash the blood from their hands.

Now came the knocking at the south entry. Enter from below the drunken porter with his load of obscenely shaped driftwood. He committed it to the fire, piece after piece, staggered to the south entry and admitted Macduff and Lennox.

Simon Morten looked as fit as a fiddle. He and Lennox brought the fresh morning air in with them as he ran upstairs to Duncan’s bedroom. The door shut behind him.

Macbeth stood very still, every nerve in his body listening, Lennox went to the fire, warmed his hands and gossiped about the wildness of the night.

The door upstairs opened and Macduff came out.

Extraordinary! He was as white as a sheet. He whispered: ‘“Horror. Horror. Horror.”’

Now disaster broke: the alarm bell, the disordered guests, Lady Macbeth’s ‘fainting’ when her husband’s speech threatened to get out of hand, the appearance of the two frightened sons, their decision to flee. And the little front scene when Macduff, an Old Man and Ross speak an ominous afterword and the first part closes.

V

Peregrine finished his notes. Macbeth and Macduff waited behind. They were on stage.

‘Come on,’ said Peregrine. ‘What was the matter? You’re both good actors but you don’t turn sheet-white out of sheer artistry. What went wrong?’

Sir Dougal looked at Simon. ‘You went up before I did,’ he said. ‘You saw it first.’