The morning after, they read the brilliant notices at Le Bourget airport, hopped on the plane, and returned to London to start rehearsing The Cherry Orchard in the Waterloo Road that afternoon. This breathtaking and rather enviable itinerary – wrapping one movie, attending the glittering première of another, starting rehearsals for an eight-month season of leading classical roles – reveals a small fact of some academic interest; namely, that Laughton was not contracted to the Vic Season, as Guthrie misremembers and most other accounts repeat, because of his success in Henry VIII on account of its not yet having opened. He was none the less already known – and perceived – as a Hollywood actor. Harcourt Williams in Old Vic Saga refers to him as ‘the man from Hollywood’; and on the last night of the Vic Season, the gallery-ites called out ‘Good Old Nero!’ The Cherry Orchard was the second play in the season, which had somewhat unhappily begun with Twelfth Night, featuring the eccentric casting of Lydia Lopokova, Mrs Maynard Keynes, exprima ballerina in the Diaghilev Company.
