Early stages

School was the perfect place to catch the acting bug, says Rachael Stirling — even if her family had to sit through some awful nonsense

 I have misgivings about boarding schools, but this much I know is good: in an effort to engage easily bored young minds outside the academic syllabus, there is nothing my own alma mater — Wycombe Abbey — wouldn’t do. There were concerts put on, plays staged, musicals sung, art trips to Florence and Duke of Edinburgh trips to China, or Stokenchurch, and of course there were lacrosse teams to join if you were that way inclined. (I was not, I might add; it is muddy and cold and awful, not to mention dangerous.)

I spent most of my time in the Lancaster Arts Centre or ‘LAC’ as it was called; a 1960s building that rises up from the edge of a lake just inside the wall of the school grounds. It is all concrete and breeze block and glass. By rights it should be hideous, yet somehow it is beautiful. It has a fully equipped 400-seat theatre, two floors of well-lit exhibition space and another big studio space with floor-to-ceiling windows, which looked out over the water. As a child I had spent a certain amount of time backstage, being the daughter of an actress, and like a homing pigeon I attached myself to that building. I took part in anything that meant I might spend more time in it. I suffered the grim pangs of homesickness terribly, and would go there and rehearse and forget myself for a while.

The plays we put on were not always brilliant. I remember a very painful house play which had something to do with Francis Drake.