As soon as the curtain rose on the set, I was enchanted - Kate McLoughlin, Bronze Patron

I even remember the date: 9 May 1984.  I lived in Wirral and had just turned 14.  The Royal Shakespeare Company was coming to the Liverpool Empire to perform Much Ado About Nothing.  My cousin Caroline, who was doing English Lit A Level, was going with her mother (my mother’s sister) and they asked if my Mum and I would like to join them.  All I had seen at the theatre were amateur pantomimes.  I didn’t know whether to be more excited about going to see Shakespeare or going to see Shakespeare with Caroline, who, glamorous-beyond-belief to me then, had Italian leather stilettos and a bubble-perm.

As soon as the curtain rose on the set, I was enchanted.  It was a gleaming array of golds, musk-browns and sepias—the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.  The action was completely engrossing.  There’s a scene in which the character Benedick is concealed while the others, as a joke, talk about how much Beatrice is in love with him.  Derek Jacobi, playing Benedick, emerged from behind the chair where he had quite obviously been hiding, surveyed the audience for just the right amount of time and drawled the line ‘This can be no trick’.  The entire theatre shouted with laughter.  I was practically delirious.  At the end of the play, though I knew nothing of theories about how dancing re-establishes harmonious relations, I felt a great sense of resolution as the couples performed stately figures together on-stage.  The Liverpool audience gave Jacobi and Sinéad Cusack, who played Beatrice, eleven curtain-calls.  I had watched, without any awareness of the significance, one of the greatest RSC productions of all time.