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Everett awoke and found himself fêted. Julian Wadham, who in the West End would portray Another Country's well-meaning head prefect Barclay, had been at Ampleforth with the play's star. "I'd known him since he was 14," he recalls, "and it felt as though this part had been written for him. It was the most extraordinary fit. Bennett is a rebel and a subversive and Rupert is innately one too, and both are highly intelligent and both were frustrated by the limiting vision of a public school background. What's relevant in the play to Bennett was relevant to Rupert, which was that he was gay."

Audiences were enthralled not only by Everett, but by a play which hilariously and movingly trained a microscope on the English Establishment. Mitchell had been spurred on by the pontifications of newspaper columnists. "They didn't make the connection between the gayness and the treason. It's quite different wanting to join the communist party and change the world, and wanting to betray your country."

Robert Fox, younger brother of Edward and James, was emboldened to take up producing in order to squire Another Country into the West End. And here the hunt for talent began anew. Everett had not clicked with Joshua Le Touzel, who played the Marxist firebrand Tommy Judd in the original cast. Fox's then wife, the casting director Celestia Fox, began searching for a replacement. She didn't have to look far. Branagh was finishing his last year at RADA.

"He was in a different league," she remembers. "It was extraordinary that someone at that age was that good. Everyone knew he was going to be amazing. I remember he had no nerves at all." And yet for all his obvious talent, it was a struggle to get an untried trainee into the company and the management had to go to some length to prove that no one already with an Equity card could play the part as well.

As well as launching actors, Another Country created new producers. Once the play began its run in early 1982, one young member of the cast was so stunned by the gigawatt glow of his colleagues' performances that it persuaded him that he had no future in acting. "I'd been a child actor and done reasonably well," says David Parfitt. "But you look at those two and go, 'I'm never going to be Hamlet, this is the moment to move on.'"

Luckily for Parfitt, his next career move became clear to him as he and Branagh kicked their heels backstage. "Ken and I had next-door dressing rooms and communicated a lot. We had quite a lot of spare time and weren't terribly used to that and decided that we would put on a production outside the theatre."

The show was a short Gogol play adapted by Mitchell, which the company performed at lunchtime in a small theatre in Waterloo. Parfitt and Branagh were soon talking about forming their own company, although their learning curve steepened as the cast failed to negotiate a pay rise at the end of their six-month contracts.

"A lot of us were thinking, they can't do without us," recalls Parfitt. "That got us talking about control and why we needed to understand more about the business we were in." In 1987 Parfitt and Branagh founded the highly acclaimed Renaissance Theatre Company and would go on to make many films together. Parfitt's recent productions include My Week with Marilyn, Parade's End and, only this week on television, The Wipers Times.

Meanwhile back at the Queen's Theatre Everett was replaced the older and more emotionally saturnine Day-Lewis as Bennett, to be followed in his turn by a very youthful Firth, who was still at drama school and triggered the same issues with Equity. When the film was made in 1984, Everett returned but Branagh was playing Henry V for the RSC so they looked in-house for another Judd and cast Firth.

Firth once told me that this was a defining moment in his career, ensuring that he was forever seen by directors as an actor who keeps a lid on things. "Because Bennett was so demonstrative and ebullient I felt that if anything I was going to get typecast that way. Because I played the character in the film who's a much more contained person it went that way instead."

Can lightning strike again? Another Country is being revived. Every casting director will be heading to Chichester to see if Rob Callender as Bennett and Will Attenborough as Judd can repeat thespian history. "This cast is if anything slightly better than we were," says Julian Wadham who is now playing the one adult character, a visiting aesthete who wafts Bloomsburyite ideas around like a raffish fragrance.

^{Julian Wadham (above right) returns to Another Country 30 years after starring in the original West End production. Photo: Johan Persson}

The more searching question is whether the play itself can speak to an audience whose memories of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt will have taken on a sepia tint. Of course sex and class are always in vogue, but Mitchell argues that the play has taken on renewed pertinence now that state snooping no longer happens behind an Iron Curtain

"Of course communism no longer has any validity for young people," he says, "but idealism has not died and the extraordinary thing is the fear of an Orwellian society has led to idealism being against big government." As for persecution of young gay men, he worries that if anything it's even worse than in his day. And it was bad then. The playwright, now 78, left Winchester 60 years ago, but stinging memories linger on of sadistic prefects licensed by the status quo to torment younger boys.

"One of them I'm glad to say electrocuted himself in his own garage. By mistake. When I heard that I rejoiced. A horrible man." Mind you, he didn't like Blunt much either: "the coldest lizard I ever met."

Another Country runs at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester from 18 September to 19 October. www.cft.org.uk/another-country