“Everything about him was suddenly different when he started talking about him,” she says. “I didn’t realise before, but he told me that he pretty much lives for Shakespeare and he knew whole scenes off by heart.

“I was amazed. When I first met him, he would always look down at the ground and didn’t say much, but when he started talking about Shakespeare and started performing his plays, he became a different person.

“His favourite play is Macbeth and when he first performed Act I Scene I it gave me goosebumps, and it reminded me of what my job is all about. He’s always got a massive smile on his face when I see him now, the change in him has been incredible.”

At the time of that first meeting, Harry, who is in his 40s and has a history of mental health issues, had been referred to Derventio after he had been living in a hostel for homeless people in Derby.

Prior to that, he had been homeless for six years, spending his nights either sofa-surfing or sleeping outdoors, mired in drug addiction and still suffering from the grief caused when his beloved father had died two years before.

Derventio found him somewhere to live and assigned Alice to be his asset coach.

The nature of Alice’s work means that she looks for the positives: she focusses on the skills and abilities of each of the people she works with so that the sense of achievement they get through taking part sends happy ripples through the rest of their lives.

Buoyed by their new-found self-confidence, they are then more able to address the thornier issues they are facing, such as drug or alcohol addiction.

Harry, with his plays of Shakespeare, was a textbook example of how this works, because of the way in which nothing about him had suggested to Alice that waiting in the wings of this shy and reclusive individual was a thespian who revelled in taking centre stage.

Following their initial conversation about Shakespeare, Harry asked Alice to photocopy Act I, Scene I of Macbeth for him, because he did not have his own copy.

She did this. However, a colleague of hers went one better when she returned to work the following Monday clutching the complete works of Shakespeare, which she’d spotted in a charity shop and bought for the princely sum of £6.

Alice made sure she got her money back by claiming £6 from Derventio’s Empowerment Fund, which pays for every-day objects that are deemed beneficial to the people like Harry it works with, and Alice took the book round the next time she visited him.

It was, arguably, the best value that anyone has ever got from a £6 purchase and it has totally changed Harry’s life.

“When we gave the books to him, he was amazed, and he cried,” Alice says. “It turns out that Harry and his father used to read Shakespeare together, so the plays are a link to him. This gives him enormous comfort, and, although he knows all of the plays, especially Macbeth, he still loves to read them and refresh them in his mind.

“He’s so good that I told him that he could be an actor. You can see the change in him, everything he has gone through comes out into his performance. It’s wonderful to watch.

“Our discovery of Harry’s love of Shakespeare has made a huge difference because it allows him to read the books and perform for us. As a result, he is so much more confident and that has helped us to work on other aspects of his life, such as living skills, while he has also had grief counselling.

“He has spoken to me about volunteering to be an actor but sadly that’s not possible at the moment because of Covid, but it’s definitely something I hope that he will pursue in the future.”

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