Portable Theatre was formed on a hot summer day in August 1968.

We were in the small kitchen of the flat in Earlham Street, Covent Garden, which David Hare shared with two other people from Cambridge. I'd dropped in for a cup of tea. David said, 'I'm thinking of starting a theatre company; would you be interested?' I didn't say yes immediately. He brought the tea across and I looked at the radio sitting on the shelf by the sink. I said, 'We could call it Portable Theatre. You know . . . pick it up, put it down.' Then we sat down and wrote a press release, the gist of which was that, after a certain modest reluctance, we had succumbed to the pleas of assorted theatrical luminaries and started an exciting new theatre company: Portable Theatre. We also wrote two letters asking for what would now be called sponsorship, for the two items we felt we'd need: a van and an electric typewriter. I knew from being in bands we'd need a van, and in those pre-photocopying days we needed an electric typewriter to cut the stencils to Roneo the scripts. What these scripts might be, we hadn't a clue. In one of the first of a series of lucky breaks, Olympia gave us a typewriter and Volkswagen gave us an extraordinarily generous discount on a camper van.