In 1977, the Festival was held at St Andrews University. Among the participants that year was a young Roger Michell. Prefiguring some of the massive success he has since enjoyed with films like Notting Hill and the brilliant TV adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia, three of his Cambridge University productions had been selected for the festival. But as it turned out he was only able to take two up to Scotland: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Edward Bond’s play about Shakespeare and Jonson - Bingo. “Both starred the brilliant Alan Barker,” he recalls.

In the seventies, before the festival had found its home in Scarborough – replete with its panoply of eccentrically decorated guest-houses and self-catering holiday flats - accommodation was a much more haphazard affair: “Eight of us slept on the floor in a very cold room in a house owned by young academics. They were vegetarians and fed their baby daughter on something horribly pink called SosMix. I snored all night and people threw shoes at me.”

Apart from these privations, much of what Michell remembers could be equally applied to any recent festival: “The best bits were the workshops with Jane Howell and Mike Alfreds, and mixing it up with other students from around the country. They all seemed much, much cooler and more advanced than the Cambridge contingent, particularly those who came from colleges with drama departments. I felt we were behind the times.”

Of his early triumph, he vividly remembers: “I had to leave a day early to get the car back to my Mum. We drove through the night. I was asleep the next day when the phone rang. "Get back up here! You just won the Buzz Goodbody Award!"”

It is exciting to think that the reason Michell continues to return to the theatre (his production of Joe Penhall’s new play Landscape With Weapon has just finished a successful run at the National), in spite of all his success in cinema, could be down to a passion that was nurtured by NSDF.

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