Great spectations in the eyes of a child

'We used to adopt different audience characters - the cougher, the chocolate-box rustler and so forth'

When I was a small boy, I became extremely smitten with the theatre.

When I was a small boy, I became extremely smitten with the theatre.

This often happens to children with an exhibitionist streak - they start dressing up or writing plays or insisting on performing for grown-ups, and the grown-ups all smile and applaud and say to one another, out of the child's hearing: "Young Simon is obviously a natural entertainer - it looks as if we're going to have an out-of-work actor on our hands for the next 40 years... "

It was rather different for me. Although I was theatre-struck, I didn't have an exhibitionist streak. I was, if anything, unbearably shy. I hung around on the edges of crowds, mingling unobtrusively, afraid to stand out. When I read about the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's time, it wasn't the actors I identified with - it was the groundlings I envied, all cracking nuts, swigging drinks and occasionally heckling.

I didn't realise it consciously at the time, I think, but whereas other children wanted to put on a show or write a show or act in a show, I wanted to watch the show.

I wanted to be a spectator when I grew up.

And indeed I couldn't wait to grow up to do it, so I formed a small troupe of play-goers there and then.

There were five of us, all of whom really loved the theatre but had no talent for anything except appreciation, so we let it be known that we were available for appreciation purposes.

That was more useful than it may perhaps sound.

After all, all the children who decided to put on shows in their own homes needed someone to come and look at their shows in their own home, and when they had run out of reluctant parents and relatives, they had nowhere else to turn.

Now they could turn to us.

We were much in demand to go to people's houses and watch the shows they had put on, which often meant them doing more than one performance - one for the parents; one for us. That gave them the feeling that they had started a run and then finished it, because two performances can easily constitute a run. Sometimes they would so enjoy putting on their performance, that they would beg us to come back a second time, and we always would, because one of the joys of being an audience is being able to compare performances.

"Not as good as last night," we'd say, as we trooped out of their sitting-room. Or, "Needs pacing more in the later scenes, don't you think?"

Because, of course, being an audience is only one step removed from being a critic. Not that I would ever like to be a critic, or be called one. A critic never really enjoys a play; he enjoys only comparing it with other productions he has seen. He has been to so many shows, that he would feel they were wasted if he didn't spend his life comparing this with that. A reviewer once told me that he purposely hid his feelings, but I think he was wrong. He didn't have any feelings to hide.

After a year or two, we were a very successful audience indeed. There were nearly a dozen of us by now, which was enough to turn a domestic show from disaster to triumph. We even used to dress up as an audience - one or two of us in cast-off dinner jackets, others sporting opera glasses, that sort of thing - and adopt different audience characters (the cougher, the chocolate-box rustler and so on). We might have gone on to greater things if it had not been for the Christmas play at the Averys' house.

We had never been an audience for the Averys before. They were a big family who had just moved into the area and who loved putting on shows, it was said. They invited us to come along as the famous local audience, and we were glad to, but something very strange happened as soon as we arrived.

They took our coats and gave us numbered tickets in exchange.

Then they sold us some programmes (which contained nothing much but advertising).

Then they asked us if we would like to book drinks for the interval.

It gradually dawned on us that what the Averys really liked doing was not putting on plays, but doing front of house and getting money out of an audience.

We had met our match. We lost heart after that and never performed as an audience again.

From my forthcoming autobiography, "Memoirs of a Spectator"