Scenes

Lots of schools audiences. This is good. I don't think audiences quite realise how much a cast can hear and see of them sometimes. Usually as a sort of many-headed blur out in the half-dark of the auditorium. But you can often see the front few rows pretty clearly, and hear a lot of what's going on out there. It's not the cinema, you know. We can hear your asides, we're just keeping to the convention that we can't. Like the 'privacy' of curtains round a bed in a ward.

Young kids don't always get theatrical convention. They answer questions for you, or shout helpful advice. "What should I do?" Titty asks at one point, trapped in a storm with the Amazons abroad on her island.

"Hide!" shouts one kid. "Steal their boat!" shouts another. She does both, which is lucky for those kids.  I guess they understand the conventions of telly or story telling, though I also wonder if they think they've given her those ideas?

"We built the harbour, made the fireplace with our own blood, sweat and tears!" sing the Amazons.

"That's gross," opines a young lady in the third row.

Someone suggested I should stab the policeman with a spear when he comes to tell us off. Ha, kids today, eh?

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I've never done a relaxed performance before. This isn't because I'm remarkably uptight as an actor, neurotic mess though I may be. This is a performance for audience members who don't respond well to the usual restrictions. So the house lights stay on, the audience can move about and talk as much as they want and our louder special effects are muted. It's for families who can't come to standard performances for whatever reason - very young babies, children with special needs like autism (which makes theatre additionally confusing and alarming), elderly bladder limitations, that kind of thing.

Really odd, from up on stage. Someone in the auditorium echoes most of our lines back to us. We can see people wandering around from time to time (just as in school shows, where teachers ferry kids in and out of the loo all through everything). There's a strange and rather ghoulish chorus of moans and howls that comes and goes. It's hugely distracting, so we all cling desperately to our stage relationships to focus through it.

But it's very gratifying, to know you're giving a show for people who don't get to see them otherwise. We go out to meet the audience (and reassure them that we're just normal people really, or at least as near to it as theatrical types get) afterwards.

One family tells us it's the first time they've got to go to a show all together, as their young son's condition means they wouldn't be allowed in otherwise. He calls us all by our character names and plays enthusiastically with the puppets.

There's a group of old folks from a home, who all look very dazed but pleased. When I say hello and ask if they enjoyed it, one of them asks me to help her put her coat on. Is that a no? Or does she think I'm a carer? No idea, she's pleased enough to see me either way.

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We get letters from some of the children who've seen the show, politely formulaic ones where the teacher has told them to list their favourite bits and wildly enthusiastic ones where they've drawn elaborate scenes from the play in orange felt-tip.

None of the representations of Roger has a beard. I feel this is significant in some way.

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The Theatre Christmas Party is at the local Skiddaw Hotel. I don't drink anything, but I still dance about like a big floppy twat once the disco starts up. Facebook, I hate you preemptively.

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Corpsing happens.

I drop a clasp knife which is about to be referred to in the subsequent scene. It bounces once, falls through a hole in the set and is gone. We can do nothing except continue, all of us desperately trying to work out what we'll do to cover this.

Stage management hand me a replacement as I squat by the wings during the next song. It's a rather incongruous stainless steel butter knife from the Green Room. Definitely not the knife we just had or what the actors on the other side of the stage are expecting to have handed to them, but at least a knife, thank God. But because I know how poor a replacement it is, I start cracking up in advance of handing it over.

"Hand me that knife you found, ship's boy," John tells me.

Roger wants to keep the knife for himself, he's pretending to have forgotten all about it. So I say "Whaaa-haa-haaat kniii-hiiiife?" in return. It's an unusual choice, as line readings go, but I think I make it feel justified.

Not as bad as Nancy's fumbled line "Titty didn't hear much dicking", a few shows previously. Not digging, then? Well, okay, I guess that's new direction. We all break upstage to unearth a treasure chest with far more urgency than usual on that cue so we can snigger in private.

"Did she just say dicking?" asks everyone on the front five rows.

Yes, audience, yes she did. Now let's all move on.