But I am a long way away, far gone in one of those interminably rambling reveries about childhood – I am actually back at kindergarten, offering my toys to other little boys for them to break – the sort of reverie which in my experience anyway, only the live theatre provides the ideal conditions for. Concerts are excellent for all manner of light musings upon the present, and I find that I can formulate the most vigorous and hopeful schemes for my future in the cinema; but I need the mannered drone of stage voices, I need artifice close and palpable, if I am to set about retracing my steps in earnest to the mud and silt of my origins. Once, half way through a cycle of history plays at Stratford, I actually made it back to the moment of my conception. The sensation was not unlike rising suddenly from a bent position and seeing stars. And on another occasion – I think it was when Camilla and I were in Persepolis for Orghast – I retrograded even further. Back, back I went, way beyond that sudden shock of stars. But I have nothing to report of my journey. No smiling face of God, no silver clouds, nothing. Just blackness, chaos, and confusion. Not unlike the second half of the cycle of history plays.

A lively song, performed with gusto by the athletic inmates of Charenton –

What’s in it for the population,

If there ain’t universal copulation? –

interrupts me from my recollections of the day I was presented with my first rattle. Not quite off the stage, and not quite on the stage, but definitely underneath my very nose, lunatics of both sexes are interfering with one another’s diapers and suiting their actions to the words of the song. This is known as mime.

Camilla digs me with her elbows. ‘They’re certainly spirited,’ I concede.

De Sade, in the meantime, is peering into Marat’s bath. As is Camilla. ‘Marat,’ he says, ‘during my thirteen years rotting in the nick’ – have I mentioned that this is an up-dated version of French history? – ‘I came to understand that our greatest imprisonment is a fleshly one, each of us locked in a body that torments and terrifies, each body racked by its own relentless dissidence.’

Beside him, hovering over Marat’s now overcrowded ablutions, but lost in a kind of half ecstasy, Charlotte Corday has her breasts out again and is caressing them, allowing the audience to see the knife that nestles between them like a silver serpent.

‘For thirteen years, behind thirteen doors,’ de Sade continues, ‘I put my mind to no other question but the orifices of the body.’

‘You listen to this,’ Camilla tells me.