Two points to add which occur to me as this 3-month old thread has resurfaced --

1 Isla was iirc the provider of the background singing in the "Madding Crowd" movie, was she not? - which might reinforce the relevance of my memory of her singing it at the Players back then.

2 Something I definitely recall is that she got such applause that the Players Chairman called on her for an encore, and she sang Johnnie Todd, with accompaniment of the little band they had -- first time I had ever heard it, some years before it took the nation by storm as the "Z-Cars tune" -- that pioneering cop-soap* having first hit the Beeb's screens in 1962.

≈M≈


*"savons policiers" as I call them -- is that my own invention?