Out stepped Orsino and the opening lines sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard as a young Edward Petherbridge took us through his melancholy. Suzanne Bertish joined him as Olivia and Bob Peck as Malvolio, Roger Rees as Aguecheek and a 39-year-old Ian McKellen as Sir Toby Belch. Suddenly a language that was hundreds of years old seemed to be coming alive in front of me. People were simply talking to each other.

Bridget Turner as Maria accidentally dropped an entire tea set on the floor. Without missing a beat, McKellen incorporated the clearing up into his speech. I was 2ft away from this virtuosic display and I remember feeling ecstatic. I got home and announced to my parents: “I want to go into the theatre.”

Analysis – David Benedict

In 1978, following up on an initiative by its actors, the Royal Shakespeare Company set off on its first small-scale tour to 26 towns in England and Scotland with the same cast playing Twelfth Night and Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Hugely successful, it even won the RSC its first sponsorship deal: £12,000 from Hallmark Cards.

Trevor Nunn directed the mesmerising Three Sisters – it later played the Warehouse, a small Covent Garden space that became the Donmar Warehouse – and oversaw the equally successful Twelfth Night, which marked the professional directing debut of Jon Amiel, now a screen director best known as the BAFTA-nominated director of Dennis Potter’s TV masterpiece The Singing Detective.

Unusually young for the role, Ian McKellen played Toby Belch as gleefully predatory and Bob Peck, a notably quiet actor immensely well-regarded by the profession – not least by McKellen, who has credited him with guiding him in verse-speaking – was amusingly cast against type as a magnificently vain Malvolio.