When he was young, the actor Hugh Bonneville was ambitious and thrusting, but a bit bumbling, too: no sooner had he filed his elbows to a point and aimed them in the direction of his next big break than something would almost inevitably go a bit wrong. Take, for instance, the time he decided it would indeed be possible to appear in two National Theatre productions on the same evening. He pulled it off, but not without making a minor tit of himself while dressed as a Roman legionnaire.
At the time, Bonneville was appearing on some nights in Lorca’s Yerma in what was then the Cottesloe, the National’s third theatre, and on others in Molière’s School for Wives in the Lyttelton, its second. Naturally, he was thrilled to be in both, for all that his roles were miniature (in the Lorca, he was a flamenco-dancing villager; in the Molière he was only in crowd scenes); it was entirely marvellous to be playing alongside Celia Imrie, Roger Lloyd Pack and Juliet Stevenson. But he was also restless. The real action was going on in the Olivier theatre, where Anthony Hopkins was starring in Antony and Cleopatra.
