Not strictly panto

My friend Robin, a retired financier, is a fine comic actor but he’d be the first to admit he has a problem with lines. He bursts on to the rehearsal stage in a huge grey wig and launches into an anarchic approximation of his part as the Magistrate at Calcutta in Around the World in Eighty Days — my adaption of Jules Verne’s classic, and this year’s Christmas show at Helmsley Arts Centre in Yorkshire.

Robin is off-piste from start to finish, but with gusto and style. The sentences he imposes on Phileas Fogg and Passepartout (for the latter’s failure to remove his hat and shoes in the pagoda of Malebar, you may recall) are rarely the sentences, in either sense, that Verne or I wrote. They vary from one rehearsal to the next, and the other actors just have to follow as best they can. By the time the Magistrate leads them off in an unruly conga at the end of the scene, the director — that’s me — is laughing so much it seems pointless to make them do it again.

This is amateur theatre at its most hilarious. The cast includes the vicar, the window cleaner and a lady who breeds pigs. Three generations of the same family form the backbone of the backstage crew. If you think I sound like Lynda Snell, I can tell you that the real thing is vastly more entertaining as a pastime — almost narcotically so —  than anything you’ve ever heard on The Archers.

Christmas shows in Ambridge or Helmsley are about the taking part, rather than the winning of drama awards. I’m a last-minute learner of lines myself, so I’m tolerant of actors clutching their books at the dress rehearsal.