returned to Covent Garden as a guest artist to dance Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. The following year he again directed and choreographed an opera there, The Golden Cockerel, with a cast including Mattiwilda Dobbs, Hugues Cuénod and Geraint Evans. The following year brought two contrasting directing engagements: the first was The Tempest at the Old Vic, with Michael Hordern as Prospero, Richard Burton as Caliban and Claire Bloom as Miranda. Then followed Noël Coward's musical After the Ball, based on Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. Helpmann discovered that the combination of Coward and Wilde was not a success: "Everything that Noël sent up, Wilde was sentimental about, and everything that Wilde sent up Noël was sentimental about. It was two different points of view and it didn't work." In May 1955 Helpmann returned to Australia, leading a tour of the country by the Old Vic company, with Hepburn as a guest artist. He played Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Angelo in Measure for Measure and Shylock. At the Old Vic in 1956 he directed John Neville and Claire Bloom in Romeo and Juliet, a production later given on Broadway. He joined the company as an actor later in the year, playing Shylock, Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Saturnius in Titus Andronicus and the title role in Richard III. During 1957 Helpmann played the title role in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nekrassov, and then took over the lead part of Sebastien in Coward's comedy Nude with Violin in London. The role had been created by John Gielgud, who had been succeeded, not altogether satisfactorily, by Michael Wilding. Helpmann's vitality revived the spirits of the company, and the play continued its run into the following year. Helpmann toured Australia in the piece in 1958–59, after he had returned to ballet for a season at Covent Garden in The Rake's Progress, Hamlet, Coppélia, Miracle in the Gorbals and Petrushka. His performance in the last of these was not well received: in the role of a lovelorn puppet, he was seen as too overtly human and intelligent. 1960s At the start of the 1960s Helpmann worked mostly in non-ballet theatre, forgoing the opportunity to create the role of the Widow Simone in Ashton's La fille mal gardée in favour of directing Vivien Leigh and Mary Ure in Jean Giraudoux's play Duel of Angels on Broadway. In 1962 he performed again for