O TABLADO: Brazil's premier actor's nursery

Maria Clara Machado at the door of her beloved theatre in its early years.

For generations of Brazilian actors, O Tablado, in Rio de Janeiro, has been much more than a theatre school. Founded in 1951, it became one of the country's most important breeding grounds for acting talent, producing countless performers who went on to successful careers in theatre, film and television.

With Rio being the home of TV Globo, Brazil's largest television network, O Tablado was also a natural hunting ground for casting directors and talent scouts. Many of Brazil's best-known actors, including Malu Mader, Miguel Falabella, Cláudia Abreu and Drica Moraes, began their journeys there.

At the heart of it all was Maria Clara Machado (1921–2001), the remarkable playwright, director and teacher who founded the theatre. She transformed children's theatre in Brazil, writing classics such as Pluft, o Fantasminha (Pluft, the Little Ghost), O Cavalinho Azul (The Little Blue Horse) and A Bruxinha que Era Boa (The Little Witch Who Was Good). Her plays, full of imagination, humour and humanity, became part of the cultural upbringing of generations of Brazilian children.

My own journey at O Tablado began when I was just 14.

My first improvisation classes, at the age of 14, were led by Carlos Wilson, affectionately known as Damião. He was an influential director whose celebrated 1982 stage adaptation of Jorge Amado's Capitães da Areia became a landmark of Brazilian youth theatre. The production helped launch the careers of actors including Felipe Camargo, Bianca Byington, Maurício Mattar, Alexandre Frota and Roberto Bomtempo. Even Jorge Amado himself praised the adaptation. It was an extraordinary theatrical environment in which to begin my training.

The modernised auditorium

Under Damião's guidance, I discovered the extraordinary freedom of improvisation, creating characters and finding humour and emotion through performance. What began as a teenage adventure gradually developed into something much more serious. Damião also introduced me to Shakespeare (he was the first Caliban I ever watched) and to Brecht, when I watched him several times in Happy End, in 1981.

Over the following years, theatre became an increasingly important part of my life, eventually bringing me to the brink of a career in Brazilian television.

But I had another dream.

I wanted to come to Britain, to live in London and study here. So, just as the possibility of a professional acting career was beginning to open up in Brazil, I chose a different path. Acting, however, never entirely left me.

And now, many years later, as I return to the stage and immerse myself once again in acting and Shakespeare, I find myself looking back at those early days at O Tablado with enormous affection.

It was where I first discovered the joy of performing, the thrill of improvisation and the extraordinary connection between an actor and an audience.

Some things, it seems, never really leave you.