Aged 16, I was alone, centre stage, dressed in full Native American chief's costume with warpaint, lit by a shaft of lime-light from the top of London's Royal Albert Hall. The Hall was packed with friends and families of the several hundred Boy Scouts who were performing a pageant play, and as the sound of the tom-toms started in the darkness and the light widened to reveal dozens of boys dressed as Indians, I knew I was hooked on Showbiz!

In 1954 I was asked to complete the cast of R.C. Sherriff's famous anti-war play "Journey's End", directed by a very young Peter Watkins, who later upset the government of the day and the BBC by making the anti-nuclear war film "The War Game". The company was called Playcraft and operated in the through-lounge of a private house in suburban Canterbury. Chairs were borrowed from neighbours and we played for five nights to an audience of thirty-five, seated in the back half of the room. The other half became the stage, with sound and lights being controlled from the cupboard under the stairs. At such short range we learned that sincere realism was the only style for successful acting.

When three members of the company turned professional, we disbanded. My future wife and I revived it four years later. We used the Dominican Priory in St Peter's Lane, Canterbury for several years and then transferred to the Gulbenkian Theatre on the campus of The University of Kent.

I argued that the better the script, the better the chance of good acting and production. So we performed "Hamlet", "Macbeth", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Twelfth Night", and "Measure for Measure", Jonson's "Volpone" and "The Alchemist", plays by Pinter, Chekhov, Shaw, Sheridan, Ibsen, Becket, Albee, Arthur Miller and many more European and American dramatists.

I tried the professional theatre for a short time but decided that being my own boss as an amateur was more rewarding.

With Ashcan I have directed "Someone To Watch Over Me", "Death and The Maiden", "The Last Yankee", and "Art", as well as acting in "Waiting for Godot", and "Duck Variations".

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