She had worked with Gupta before, on last year’s production of Bollywood musical Wah! Wah! Girls, but this project was rather different, a multi-stranded, vibrant production, which depicted the close relationship that developed between the ageing Queen Victoria and her proud young Indian servant Abdul Karim.

My days as a performer feel a long time ago. But I’m the sum of my experiences  and I understand that it can be very exposing to be a performer, so I do everything in my power to set them up to succeed

“It’s a real epic piece in the Shakespearean line,” Rice told me. “There are three intertwining storylines – one is about Queen Victoria and her relationship with Karim; another is about Rani Das, a woman who is dumped at the docks and needs to make her way in England; and the third is about Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian member of parliament. They all start on the boat at the beginning, and we watch what happens as they arrive in London.”

Rice always wanted the piece to be more than a costume drama. “I wanted it to feel rough and relevant and contemporary – because it is,” she said. “We don’t know this history, we’ve been denied this history, and that was irresistible. The brilliant thing about this show is that the play represents the rehearsal room – we’re a fantastically diverse group of people. There’s a great symmetry between the piece and the process.”

Beatie Edney and Tony Jayawardena in The Empress. Photo: Steve Tanner

Rice’s work for Kneehigh includes The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Cymbeline – which was also created in association with the RSC for its Complete Works festival – Midnight’s Pumpkin, an anarchic retelling of the Cinderella story, which was performed at the Battersea Arts Centre in London over the Christmas period, and Tristan and Yseult (derived from Celtic legend and medieval poetry), one of the company’s best-loved productions, which returns for a UK tour in June.

Much of her work for the company is created at its Cornwall base, a collection of barns on the south Cornish coast. The atmosphere generated in this place forms part of the working process. “The barns are really special,” says Rice. “They’re rough and rural but they’re very practical as well, as we tend to eat together and sit up at night, which means we spend a lot of time together, talking about the work.

“Cornwall is amazing and I miss it, but you can create a similar environment elsewhere. Without forcing it, we are spending a lot of time together in London. I always start the day with a lot of singing and movement. It’s not the same, but it works. It’s still good.”

At the same time as she was working on The Empress, Rice’s earlier show for Kneehigh, an adaptation of the much-loved Steptoe and Son, was having its London run at the Lyric Hammersmith. The two projects were strikingly different. Rice was drawn to making a stage version of the sitcom, despite never being a huge fan of it as a child.

“I was fascinated by [father and son characters Albert and Harold Steptoe], a little bit frightened, and they were always on a little bit after my bedtime,” she says. But as an adult she found there was something about that world – a particular dynamic that struck a chord, the family interplay and the sense of people being stuck with one another. “I am very interested in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s the time of my parents’ youth and my earliest memories, and something about the series resonates really strongly. The scripts are brilliant, absolutely astonishing, and I really hope people will look at [original sitcom writers] Galton and Simpson in a different light after seeing this.”

Rice has spoken in previous interviews about the congregational power of theatre, its ability to speak to a basic human need to share, gather and connect. “I really hold dear to the importance of coming together, singing together, moving together,” she says. “I think it really does make you happier, sharing meaningful experiences with the people around you.”

The company in rehearsal for The Empress. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

She initially trained as a performer at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama before spending time in Poland working with the Gardzienice Theatre Association. I ask if her background influences her approach as a director. “My days as a performer feel a long time ago. But, yes, they still influence me. I’m the sum of my experiences. I’m naturally an enabler, and I understand that it can be very exposing to be a performer, that it’s a big deal, so I do everything in my power to set them up to succeed and to support them.”

The conversation inevitably turns to funding cuts and the impact they are having and will continue to have. “I feel the world changing around us. I really, really worry,” says Rice. “These are frightening times – you’re taking away the opportunities around artists to develop.” She adds that Kneehigh is “doing what we need to keep our heads above water. It’s forcing us to be better business people.” The company is bringing back old shows – the return of Tristan and Yseult being a case in point – and is, she says, “working very hard to make sure those feel fresh and not pale imitations. We’re touring more and more to keep the company going. But my feeling is that it will be more devastating in five years’ time than it is now to us as a company, and that ultimately the nation’s artistic life will suffer”.

As tough as things are at the moment, she is more concerned at the long-term consequences, and worries that the next generation of artists are “really going to struggle”.

Tristan and Yseult is touring during the summer, beginning at West Yorkshire Playhouse from June 14-22

Tara Arts was founded in 1977 by artistic director Jatinder Verma, and the company moved into the current building 30 years ago. From 1985 onwards it operated as the Tara Arts Centre, staging a mix of in-house and touring productions. Funding cuts in the early 1990s meant that the building was used only as a rehearsal space, until it was relaunched as a theatre venue in 2007. Now Verma has plans to take things to the next level, creating a new, small-scale theatre that better reflects the company’s cross-cultural ethos while also providing a more comfortable audience experience.

Verma shows me the architectural drawings for the proposed new home, spreading them out on a table in one of the cluttered rooms that doubles as a rehearsal space. The new building will retain its original Victorian facade but this will be supplemented by a new structure, an extension of the current space. Designed by RHWL Architects’ Arts Team, which specialises in creating spaces for the performing arts, this structure will feature a bold terracotta frontage bearing the motif of a tree.

These additions will both maintain a sense of visual harmony with the Garratt Lane terrace, of which it is a part, while also making it stand out. The idea of the tree is central to the design, Verma explains, because it is a symbol of storytelling – and therefore, by extension, of theatre – in much of India and Africa, as trees were, traditionally, the places where people would join together to share stories, sheltered and shaded by the branches above.

We go downstairs into the performance space, once a Salvation Army hall, its flat roof prone to leakage. The current theatre, with its walls of chilly brick, is capable of seating 80, but the new space will be capable of seating a minimum of 100 people, and Verma is particularly excited about the fact that it will have an earth floor – another link between traditional and contemporary forms of performance and storytelling.

The toilets will be relocated to the basement, freeing up crucial space at ground level, allowing for the possibility of an all-day cafe. More excitingly, discussions with Network Rail – the building is situated directly next to the railway line – have resulted in the company acquiring some outdoor space, which will be used as a social area but also potentially for performances. The rooms above the theatre will be converted into rehearsal and development space, with another floor being added above to house the administrative offices.

The new building will also be as carbon-neutral as possible, with solar panels and ground source heating. Tara’s work has always been about the “crossing of cultures”, says Verma, and it is their intention “to inscribe this into the new building”, to create a space with a greater sense of identity, bridging two cultures. In addition to the earth floor, the doors and windows, architraves and lighting will be sourced from India in an attempt to create a stronger aesthetic reflection of the company’s philosophy.

Architectural drawing of the Tara Theatre’s proposed new building

All this, of course, costs money. A “muted local campaign” has raised £53,000, but the company’s target amount is £800,000, so there is clearly still some way to go. To this end, it is appointing a permanent in-house development director and approaching trusts and foundations while also stepping up the local campaign. Tara’s seat-naming scheme is more personal than most, allowing donors not only to name a seat, but also to pick the fabric with which their seat will be covered – the donor’s name will then be embroidered on the back.

Currently, 49% of Tara’s audience is local. The theatre is less than 20 minutes from Waterloo, and its location means that it acts as both a local and a London venue, catering to the community while also staging work that appeals to, and attracts, a much wider audience.

According to Verma, the venue has adapted over the years to reflect social shifts in the Earlsfield area. A significant population of young professional South Africans and Brazilians now lives nearby, as well as a growing Polish population, and the company has tried to programme work to cater to the tastes of these groups.

One of the most significant changes in Tara’s programming policy over the years is the recent introduction of an annual pantomime. In 2011, Hardeep Singh Kohli’s Bollywood Cinderella took the classic fairytale and gave it an Indian twist. This show proved so popular that Tara tried it again last year, staging Dick Whittington goes Bollywood. There’s an affinity between Bollywood and musical theatre, Verma says, and the success of both shows means pantomime is now a staple of the company’s line-up. High-quality children’s theatre will also be central to its programme and identity as a venue.

All these creative threads contribute to Tara’s continuing aim to be a venue that fuses the global and the local under one roof. Verma explains: “I hope the new Tara will enshrine multiculturalism as an elegant and inspirational bricks-and-mortar reality of 21st-century Britain – a reality that helps link our local community to a global sensibility, provides a home for a diversity of artists young and old, and sustains Tara in building imaginative bridges across cultures.”

Read Natasha Tripney’s online regional theatre blog at www.thestage.co.uk/columns/nationwide

While she was helping to write Angels (1975-83), a television series about a group of student nurses, she met another writer, Jill Hyem. Together, they wrote 28 of the 30 episodes of Tenko, based on the experiences of a group of women held in a Japanese internment camp after the fall of Singapore in 1942.

After working as a BBC producer’s secretary, Valery won a part in the Sid Field comedy Cardboard Cavalier (1949), followed in the same year by Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which she played the mistress of one of the eight characters Alec Guinness portrayed.

She then moved to the ITV company Associated Rediffusion, where she was one of the hosts of The Monday Club. By the end of the 1960s, she was running a shop in west London, selling bric-a-brac and second-hand clothes, when she was encouraged to write several volumes of autobiography.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Valery was a prolific writer, working on Crossroads and Emmerdale and the comedy Nanny Knows Best, starring Beryl Reid. Tenko, a Japanese word meaning ‘roll-call,’ was the brainchild of Lavinia Warner, who had researched the internment of a female nursing corps officer for an edition of This is Your Life, and was convinced of its dramatic potential.

The series was wound around a group of British, Dutch and Australian women, largely forgotten by the War Office, who had to learn to cope with malnutrition, disease, violence and death. Valery and Hyem carried out extensive research for the programme, interviewing survivors of the camps, studying diaries that had been kept and immersing themselves in archives.

Anne Valery, who was born on February 24, 1926, died on April 29, aged 87.

Everyone, that is, except BBC3 commissioners, who gave more than two hours of their Saturday-evening schedule to a lazy cut-and-paste exercise in snide, ironically entitled How to Win Eurovision.

Greg James and Russell Kane were the hosts charged with repeatedly pointing out the blindingly obvious, namely that most of the songs aren’t very good and many border on the tragically terrible. A parade of talking heads, reputedly from the worlds of comedy and acting, were enlisted to stick their own boots in, further adding to the sense of overkill.

Bearing in mind this was the comedic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, many a shoal survived to tell the tale. Those quick to sneer publicly at other performers’ work really should first check the quality of their own material.

I would cheerfully dismiss the programme as a waste of time, effort and space if it weren’t for two things.

First, the interviews with recent UK contestants, most of whom had suffered not just defeat but also abject humiliation, were interesting and moving. I even found space in my heart to pity strutting, big mouth Daz “there’s no way we are coming 17th” Sampson, who was placed 19th in 2006.

Remember? No, I thought not.

Second, the footage from previous competitions was often screamingly funny, capturing that beautiful moment of synergy when desperate attention-seeking meets epic absence of self-awareness to produce pure Eurovision gold. My advice to BBC3 is to try just running an unbroken parade of terrible efforts from the last 50 years. It would be half the length but twice as funny.

Bearing in mind this was the comedic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, many a shoal survived to tell the tale

Actresses frequently complain about the absence of work, but there seems to be no shortage of opportunities to play dead, usually naked on a slab, in police procedurals.

If you are going to do nothing except lie still and possibly catch a cold, it might as well be in something good, and dramas don’t get much better than The Fall.

Gillian Anderson plays Stella Gibson, a detective with more than a touch of frost about her, sent to Belfast to help solve a murder investigation that has hit a brick wall.

Her quarry is Paul Spector, chillingly portrayed by Jamie Dornan, a serial killer of young women who plans and commits his crimes with meticulous attention to detail and total ruthlessness.

Conventional wisdom dictates that revealing the identity of the killer from the outset should diminish all tension, but the device has quite the opposite effect. With the gulf between investigation and apprehension yawningly apparent, the sight of Spector going about his stalking and slaughter unimpeded is almost unbearable to behold.

Disturbing, appalling, original and compelling, The Fall promises to be one of the most powerful drama series of the year.

How to win Eurovision, BBC3, Saturday, May 11, 9.50pm
The Fall, BBC2, Monday, May 13, 9pm

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Cross has enjoyed a turn as renegade Nazi and certified war criminal Helmut von Schraeder in the 1980’s mini-series Twist of Fate and as Rudolf Hess in the BBC’s 2006 documentary re-enactment Nuremberg – Nazis on Trial. And the 65 year-old can now be seen playing the much-feared criminal mastermind Rabbit in HBO’s violent series Banshee, which is currently airing on Sky Atlantic.

The RADA-educated actor’s tendency to play bad guys is perhaps most surprising when one considers the role that propelled him to fame – Harold Abrahams, the nice, serious-minded Jewish athlete in the Oscar-winning 1982 movie Chariots of Fire.

So what happened after he was seen playing the fresh-faced, ruddy-cheeked youth sprinting across the sands as Vangelis’ beautiful music sweeps around him and his mud-spattered fellow runners Nigel Havers and Ian Charleson?

To be fair, Cross’ extensive career has not exclusively involved playing baddies. He has performed a host of roles in an extremely busy-looking CV, ranging from Spock’s dad Sarek in the 2009 Star Trek film to Iraqi pilot Munir Redfa in the 1988 HBO film Steal the Sky. But the bad guys have dominated, and he has a theory why.

“The business is very narrow-minded and blinkered,” he admits, speaking over the telephone from Charlotte, North Carolina, and with a candour one doesn’t expect from big-name performers who work a lot in the US. “So you get thought of in terms of your last job. So if my last job is that of a meat cleaver-wielding character, I will hardly be cast as some benign, older gentleman. I’m open to anything, but right now I am getting my artistic and professional rocks off doing Banshee.”

Banshee is nothing if not an acquired taste. A high-octane drama set in Pennsylvania’s Amish country, it stars Antony Starr as a renegade ex-con posing as a murdered sheriff dealing with a corrupt, secrets-laden world and evading Rabbit, who has a score to settle with him. It is flashy, violent and full of sex – perfect if you like that sort of thing.

Quite why his nasty character is called Rabbit is a question Cross is unable to answer. But the actor, who was brought up in a large working-class family in south London, says it is his job to bring complexity to the unpleasantness. Here he is careful to praise the show’s creators Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler for the depth and texture he says they have brought to the scripts. “It has given me a lot to work with, even from a man this nasty,” he says.

Cross also compliments the show’s production values, even if he is reluctant to mouth the “cliche” that TV now has the kind of production values we normally only saw in cinema releases – although he acknowledges that the cliche is true. He jokes that the largesse lavished onscreen ought to have been extended to the on-set catering, where he could not get hold of his favourite staple from the food truck – a bacon sandwich.

But he adds that he remains confident of there being another series of the drama, so much so that he has bought a flat in Charlotte, where filming is located.

Chariots of Fire is nearly 40 years old, and the film has followed me for many years. Now it’s part of my life

“It’s a city that is small enough for the cast and crew to hang out together. We go out for dinner a lot and go bowling,” he reveals.

Cross also has a home in London and one in Bulgaria, where he has been based ever since travelling there to work on Icon, the 2005 film starring the late Patrick Swayze. Five Bulgarian projects later, he has not looked back, and is in fact such a cultural fixture in that country that he has even filmed a bank advert with footballer and local favourite Dimitar Berbatov.

One of the reasons he stayed in Bulgaria is because he was going through a divorce – his second marriage – when he started filming Icon. “I had to go to do the contract – business first, relationships second, always,” he says with a laugh.

He loves the “lawlessness” of Bulgaria, which he says can be “unnerving” at times but he is clearly thrilled by.

“It is really rather exciting here. I am witnessing a country that is slowly coming together and getting a place in the European Union,” he explains. “You can see it grow every day, little by little, but because its growth has come later it can learn from all the mistakes of the other countries. You can see things getting better every day.”

He says those in the UK fearful of mass migration from his adopted country have nothing to fear once new rules come in next year. “Either you believe in a free market or you don’t,” he says. “If people come over to the UK and work and pay taxes, what’s the problem?”

He comes to the UK when he can, and always sees his son, Theo, an actor and novelist.

He admits he has a longing to return to London to perform theatre, having last appeared in Bruce Graham’s harrowing play Coyote on a Fence, set on death row, in 2004. Cross played John Brennan, who writes obituaries of his fellow inmates that make no mention of their crimes, incurring the wrath of the prison authorities. His performance was well received, but he complains that theatre is so badly paid it cost him £2,000 a week to be in the play.

Cross, who also sings with a Bulgarian jazz band, admits to enjoying life and his success, something he puts squarely down to Chariots of Fire, though some may surmise that his real break was playing Billy Flynn in the original West End production of Chicago.

He looks back fondly at the iconic British film. “It’s very nearly 40 years [old], and the film has followed me for many years. Now it’s part of my life,” he reflects.

He enjoyed last summer’s recent reunion showing, when the film was re-released to coincide with the London Olympics, offering him a chance to catch up with fellow Charioteers Hugh Hudson, Nicholas Farrell and Nigel Havers, colleagues he hadn’t seen “for years” at a gala showing. Cross and some of the other actors also made a surprise curtain-call appearance at the stage production at the Gielgud – a show he tactfully insists was “very effective” even if he had the suspicion that it didn’t “have long legs”. (It closed in January, a month earlier than planned.)

“Chariots of Fire launched me. I wouldn’t be here in Charlotte talking to you if it wasn’t for that film,” he adds. “I am involved in a fantastic show, which a lot of people love, and I am playing a marvellous character and I am surrounded by great people.”

The roles he gets may be bad guys, but Cross’ life certainly doesn’t seem bad at all.

The terrace, which costs £600,000 to build and manage, is an integral part of the new Assembly Rooms operation under Stand founder Tommy Sheppard. It provide services and facilities for the building and allows the producers to create a critical mass of audience in the pedestrianised street.

Sheppard told The Stage: “Last year we were too focussed on what happened in the evening, we didn’t give enough attention to what happened in the day time. The public overwhelmingly enjoyed it, but there were some elements in local businesses who felt that it wasn’t good for them.”

Having spent three months consulting with the businesses, Sheppard says that he now has a clear majority supporting the enterprise. They will be involved in providing food and drink, and bespoke marketing plans have been drawn up to ensure that they benefit from increased footfall. During the day, local clothes shops will give fashion shows and there will be pop-up makeover events.

He added: “Instead of having a solid perimeter all the way round, during shopping hours we are going to break that up quite a lot. Audiences will be able to move across and through the site a lot more easily. The idea is to involve everyone and have a festival experience that is focussed on the artistic programme but has a lot of other interesting things going on.”

Sheppard aims to bring the focus of the fringe back to George Street and the New Town, helped by the consolidation of free fringe events in venues around the area and the return this year of Universal Arts to the New Town Theatre at Freemason’s Hall on George Street.

AR Fringe and Famous Spiegeltent productions include an increased focus on performances for children, led by the world premiere of Princess Pumpalot – The Farting Princess. Entertaining Ideas, a programme of daily lunchtime spoken word events, is complemented by the return of Liz Lochhead, Scottish makar, with her own daily show.

The theatre programme is dominated by a new adaptation by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns of The Shawshank Redemption and Glen Garden’s The Killers, based on prison letters from Iain Brady, Peter Sutcliffe and Dennis Nilson to their “fans”.

The retention of the Famous Spiegeltent keeps an extra space in the Assembly Rooms complex, allowing further increases in music, comedy and cabaret, including a new show from La Clique.

Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, which is directed by Carrie Cracknell, will run from August 8 to October 26, with press night on August 14.

Hattie Morahan will reprise the role of Nora Helmer and Dominic Rowan will once again play her husband, Torvald.

Other cast members include Nick Fletcher as Nils Krogstad and Steve Toussaint as Doctor Rank.

Design is by Ian MacNeil and costumes by Gabrielle Dalton. Lighting is by Guy Hoare, with music from Stuart Earl and sound by David McSeveney. Choreography is by Quinny Sacks and the literal translation of the text is by Charlotte Barslund.

The Young Vic, Mark Rubinstein, Gavin Kalin and Neil Laidlaw are producing A Doll’s House in the West End.

David Lan, artistic director of the Young Vic, said: “We are thrilled to be back in the West End bringing our two time sold-out production of A Doll’s House to the Duke of York’s and I am delighted that throughout the run we will be offering over 29,000 West End tickets at Young Vic prices. We hope thousands more will experience this exceptional cast led by Hattie Morahan in Carrie Cracknell, Simon Stephens and Ian MacNeil’s inspired re-invention of Ibsen’s great play.”

The Rotherham-born miner-turned-club entertainer and actor passed away in a hospice in his home town in the early hours of Thursday May 16, after a short illness.

Following a colliery accident at the age of 27, Shane turned to performing on the pub and working men’s clubs circuit in his native Yorkshire. Walk-on parts on television followed before he was spotted by Jimmy Perry in a 1979 episode of Coronation Street and offered a part in Hi-de-Hi!, which proved hugely successful with audiences and ran on the BBC from 1980 to 1988.

The same year, he appeared in the pilot of You Rang, M’Lord, staying with the show for its five-year run, during which he also fronted his own short-lived series Very Big, Very Soon.

His agent Linda Kremer said: “Paul Shane was a consummate professional, a true gentleman, a good friend, and a joy to work with. He didn’t suffer fools, always maintained his sense of humour, never stinted on the time he gave to his fans. He lightened my life and I’ll miss him enormously.”

A full obituary will appear in a future print edition of The Stage.

It stars Alec Baldwin, an actor I’ve had a lifelong crush on(!) – and also the exceptional young British actor Tom Sturridge. It was also due to star Shia LeBoeuf, but he made a very widely (self-)publicised departure during rehearsals. He’s been seamlessly replaced by another superb young actor, Ben Foster (not to be confused with our own Ben Forster, who won the Jesus Christ Superstar reality TV contest casting).

The play is a tight, taut, claustrophobic three-hander, and it is no fault of these fine actors that it (and they) feel a little over-magnified in such a large Broadway house, one that is frequently home to musicals. So perhaps that is part of the reason for its failure.

But Baldwin has bitten back hard at something else, both familiar and unfamiliar. The latter is the effect of “tabloid journalism and its viral impact through the internet.” He’s referring to the way the news of LeBoeuf’s departure was reported, and says,

Bad press about films or shows of any kind can negatively affect your chances. The opportunity to influence an audience through any kind of well-conceived or well-timed ad campaign is lost. First impressions do count. If “trouble” is that first impression, it’s difficult to swim out of that riptide.

But that was then consolidated by the power of the critic, and in particular one critic: Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Here we’re on more familiar, but also deeply personal, territory. Ben, he says, is “no fan of mine (every John Simon must have his Amanda Plummer, I suppose)”.

But then the feeling seems to be mutual. Baldwin writes that Brantley is “not a good writer” and “viewed as some odd, shriveled, bitter Dickensian clerk who has sought to assemble a compendium of essays on theatre, the gist of which often have no relationship to the events onstage themselves.”

He then goes even further:

No one I know of in the theatre reads Brantley except in the way that a doctor reads an x-ray to determine if you have cancer.

And he urges his dismissal:

With the more insightful [Charles] Isherwood sitting there, writing circles around Brantley, I think it’s time for the Times to get rid of Brantley. I don’t know anyone, anyone at all, who will miss him or his writing.

I’ve often said that critics, used to giving criticism, have to be able to take it, too. But this vicious attack, however provoked he may have felt to write it, seems to cross a boundary. I don’t think that  Brantley would ever dispute Baldwin’s right to actually tread the boards.

And, checking in on Brantley’s review of the show, I see he was right about one thing: writing of Sturridge, he says,

Mr. Sturridge is playing the sort of role that comes with “Tony nominee” tattooed on its forehead, that of a mentally challenged, education-deprived person who learns to assert himself. But the physicality with which he inhabits his part is something else. He occupies John Lee Beatty’s vast, derelict set (lighted by Pat Collins) with an obsessive knowledge of its every crevice, moving as if he suspected it were rigged with land mines.

He did indeed get a Tony nomination – as did the production for Best Revival of a Play. Its closure, by the way, means that there is just one nominee of the four still running: that of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, with Golden By and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? also both long departed.

Going the distance as theatrical clowns

Twenty years ago, I had one of my most mortifying of all theatrical experiences, when I was hauled onto the stage of the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway (now the Richard Rodgers) to participate in a finale to Fool Moon, in which theatrical clowns David Shiner and Bill Irwin recreated the shooting of an old silent movie, for which I was made the clapper board man.

Now the two are back in New York for their first major theatrical collaboration since then at off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre, Old Hats. And though the show isn’t quite old hat, there’s a similar sequence in this one. Happily I wasn’t chosen this time, so I could watch as someone else entered into its spirit with more facility and lack of embarrassment than I ever did. (I still shudder at the memory).

But this trip down memory lane for these clowns also proves their ageless and peerless comic inventiveness, with an alternately manic and mellow show that is sweetly inflected by original songs performed live at the piano by the wonderful Nellie McKay and a band.

I also loved their own reflections on their art in a companion magazine put out by the theatre company. Talking of how they develop their material, Irwin notes:

No one ever knows how you make clown material – you pretend like you do, so as not to seem dumb (or to seem worth being paid a teaching dollar) – but it’s really a sort of doodling until you feel you may have started to draw something. I cannot now remember how we began on some of the bits and ideas that feel most promising in Old Hats. Sometimes it’s because something is at hand – a prop happens to be there. But then how did that prop happen to be there? Better not to think about it sometimes.

And as for passing on the legacy to another generation of clowns, David Shiner says:

I tell them to find another profession. Actually, I tell them to have patience and more patience. It’s long hard work to find something that’s original and lasting. I tell them to first focus on an eight-minute routine that works. That can take five years or more. Patience and trust in yourself. If you are fortunate enough to have a good teacher, all the better. However, do not work with Bill Irwin! His classes are full of psychological mumbo jumbo. All he does is confuse people.

Plans to refurbish the venue’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery complex, known as the Festival Wing, were unveiled earlier this year.

The centre also hopes to create a ‘glass pavilion’ over a new foyer, which would be used for music rehearsals and shows, as well as number of small, informal performance areas and new education space.

A spokeswoman for the Southbank Centre said the venue will be re-applying for HLF money towards the project. She said the centre has raised £20 million so far, subject to planning permission, and is confident it will be able to secure the remaining funds required.

She said: “It is disappointing that the Festival Wing project wasn’t successful in this round of grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund. We’re committed to this project to refurbish the 1960s buildings and the heritage of this part of the site, as well as providing more art for more people in better spaces.”

A spokeswoman for HLF said: “We were very oversubscribed for this round of funding. We looked at 12 projects and six were approved, six rejected.

“We didn’t have enough money to support all the applications we looked at. We had £129 million worth of requests and £68 million in the pot to give out.”