My poor sister sounds in a similar condition. If she manages to outlive the mad mammy, her greatest desire is to go off and end her days as a meditating hermit!
Hoo boy...
I'm just finishing the spicy Donald Spoto biography of Laurence Olivier. The lifestyle of theatre folk in those days never ceases to fascinate me. They really were very 'royal', with these great country piles and everything, where everyone decorously fucked everyone else, played croquet and charades, etc. etc. A totally weird and alien lifestyle. Olivier called it his 'baronial period'.
Can you imagine two thousand people crowding outside theatres in St Martins' Lane to see stars come out of the stage door in fedoras and gloves? Wild...