Hello, I'm Christy Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1983, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Our castaway this week is probably the most productive theatrical impresario in the world,

the head of our National Theatre-Sappita Hall. During the past 30 years,

Peter, you've been involved to vetting extensive four or five hundred productions.

Would you welcome us, fell away from it all on a desert island? No, not at all. You want to keep

bashing away. Well, I love it. Tell us how it all started. You were born in East Anglia,

where exactly? I was born in Bereson Edmunds. What theatre did you see as a child?

Well, my father was a railwoman, and he ended up as a country station master,

and we lived in the wilds of Suffolk, very near Cambridge. And the main reason I got interested

in the theatre, I suppose, was that his job allowed me to have cheap rail travel, sometimes free,

and I went to London a lot, and I saw a lot of theatre in Cambridge from about the age of 10 on.

Which productions, as a boy, particularly interested you in? Well, I remember

Gil Good's Hamlet at the Arts Theatre in about 1942. I remember seeing the marriage of Figaro,

done by Sad as well as in 1940, when they were evacuated to Cambridge, and hearing Mozart's

Requiem at King's College Chapel on my 10th birthday. A few things like that, music as much

part of it as a drama. I was stage-struck at an early age. You played Hamlet yourself at school?

I played Hamlet, yes, who didn't? But I didn't. Was acting more important than music?

You learned the piano and the organ, I believe. Yes, I did.

Well, I think if I had my time again, I would like to have been a musician.

Yes, in a way, I love the discipline of music, and I love the form of music, and I think if it hadn't

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