I’m disappointed this director didn’t plunge the knife into Dustin Hoffman

At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from the mouth of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the play in which Rudman once directed Dustin Hoffman to great acclaim. The author is also Felicity Kendal’s other half, making him a figure of envy for much of male Middle England.

A tall ‘Texan Jew’ who went to Oxford, Rudman has quite a CV. He started at the Traverse in Edinburgh, where with the approval of the theatre’s chairman Nicholas Fairbairn he put on drugs and porno plays. An award-winning stint at the Hampstead Theatre followed, then a spell at the National Theatre. He later ran the Chichester Festival Theatre before going to the Sheffield Crucible.

He’s also freelanced on Broadway and in the West End and one of his theories is that the way creatives behave is usually determined by profit. If a writer or actor thinks someone else is making a lot of cash out of his or her work then toys will invariably fly out of the pram. Put the same person in a permanently broke theatre (like Hampstead), argues Rudman, and everyone is pleasant and grown-up. Art flourishes best where bankruptcy looms.

Rudman reprints in the book a 54-point plan he drafted for his successor at Hampstead. Point 54: ‘Treat every board meeting as if it were your last.’ His stint at Chichester taught him a thing or two: ‘I thought I could deal with the board with charm and jokes.’ They sacked him. So much of directing is about diplomacy, patience and the fraught business of handling superb but tricky actors like Frances de la Tour, John Alderton and the abusive Rex Harrison.