Nearly everyone knows the story of Rebecca. Or thinks they do. When I told people I was to direct Daphne du Maurier’s stage version of Rebecca, their first question was ‘Who’s playing Rebecca?’ They meant, of course, the troubled hero’s SECOND wife but the Freudian slip is significant, as the dead Rebecca haunts the playas she haunts the novel.

The book was an instant success. Daphne du Maurier told a wonderful story, and the play contains it all: vivid characters, romance, mystery, suspense, jealousy – all set against the rugged wildness of a Cornish coast, in an ancient mansion whose name, Manderley, is known even to those who have never read the book. We are almost in the realm of myth, with echo es of other familiar tales: Jane Eyre, with HER brooding older man, Mt Rochester, is a cousin of the second Mrs de Winter – there is also an invisible wife, and a fire-while Cinderella lurks here too: we have ball, we have a gown, we have a Fairy Godmother (albeit evil) in the person of the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.

However, what should principally concern us here, is the Rebecca Daphne du Maurier wrote; the tale of a malign and evil spirit, and the characters’ sometimes desperate efforts to be free of it.

Tim Hardy