Lloyd first spotted Zegler performing on YouTube. “She’s this amazing vocalist,” he says. “Hearing her singing this material, I get goosebumps.” When he is casting a show, he always asks himself if he feels a connection with the actors. “At the first sing-through, when other people were at their music stands being very polite and formal, she was just ripping around the room and expressing herself fully. I just love that. The way I work relies on actors to feel free.”

Zegler grins and returns the compliment. “He’s a great big sweetie pie and that’s really the most important thing. There’s a deep kindness, an emphasis on showing up each day with an open heart and an open mind and to have no inhibition in performance because the second you do, the whole thing loses its shine.”

The affection he provokes in actors might well be Lloyd’s superpower as a director. In his dazzling, pink-confetti filled production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane earlier this year, which starred Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as squabbling lovers Benedick and Beatrice, every person in the cast had worked with him before—and wanted to come back.

“His spaces feel very democratic,” says Atwell, who has collaborated with him three times. “He likes actors. We might be an odd bunch, and not every director particularly likes us because we are fluid, slippery, mercurial things, playing like children do. He loves that. He wants it to feel like a playground.”

Warmth and enthusiasm have propelled Lloyd through a career that began at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and has encompassed some 70 productions as a director; now he stands at the pinnacle of his profession. He formed the Jamie Lloyd Company in 2013, committing it to an outreach program to bring in young and disenfranchised audiences. For Evita, 5,000 £25 tickets are on sale for under 30s, key workers, and those on benefits.

His directing record reveals the range and heft of his work: Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in the West End and on Broadway in an intimately revealing but spare production with Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton, and Charlie Cox; a new version of Cyrano de Bergerac starring James McAvoy; Chekhov’s The Seagull in London with Emilia Clarke; Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in New York with Jessica Chastain; a revival of The Effect with Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell; a Romeo and Juliet which had fans queuing round the block of the Duke of York’s Theatre to see Tom Holland; a visceral Sunset Boulevard, which starred Nicole Scherzinger and swept through awards season on both sides of the Atlantic.