Al Fresco

Our company has just completed an artistically successful run of open air performances in period costume, and I'm wondering tonight whether or not our amateur theatre group will ever perform indoors again.

I use the word theatre group with an almost poetic licence - we can go for years without ever going near a theatre.

First of all you have to be able to plan your programme of productions at least a year in advance to book them. This poses a rather large problem for the group I'm involved in. Our company may have been born out of the left wing theatre movement, but we wouldn't know a five year plan if it slapped us in the face (which it probably would, the distance that we've strayed from the "true left". More show-tune than showtrial nowadays - sorry, Uncle Jo).

But we can't plan the productions because we can't seem to herd the people. In our last production I tried to get the members of the cast to predict their whereabouts for a period of six weeks. By the time I eventually got them all together there was only a fortnight till we went on. And if I'm honest it might actually have been me that forgot that one lead actor had his holidays booked, and that the festival season, or the football season would naturally take precedent over people's availability to rehearse, so I'm reluctant to cast blame. But am I really expected to accept working for a living, spending quality time with one's partner and, wait for it, looking after one's child as suitable reasons not to engage with the unsurpassable delights of am-dram? I ask you.

My point is that if getting a small group of people (a cast) to predict what they will be doing in the short term is difficult, then getting a large group of people (a company) to look into the future is like trying to get grant funding from the Culture Company.... a special art, and not one that we've mastered particularly well. We can discuss any topic for hours and still resist making an actual decision. It's the curse of democracy. And I do blame the matter on our leftish heritage. I know that we are connected to a history of protest that dates back to the Spanish Civil War, but do we really have to assemble a theatrical popular front before we can decide which play to do. I bet the Generalissimo didn't dither around looking for a slot for his Much Ado - he just got on with it.

Mind you the discussion is almost academic, because supposing we could plan ahead and book the theatre, we would have to all have to sell a kidney to pay the hire costs. It's so expensive to perform in a theatre with lights and sound and, heaven forfend, a stage, even without elaborate sets and costumes - by which, of course, I mean furniture and clothing.

We've tried to be imaginative. We've played in community centres, churches and the backrooms of pubs. But how do you get people to come? In the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, you'd give your i-teeth to get to sit through an hour of something "experimental" in the backroom of the pub. People seem more reluctant to risk backroom experimentation here. Mind you it's not straightforward getting people to turn up to the Empire to watch Blood Brothers. And you can't raise a taxi on derby day, let alone a theatre-going audience.

Well, between our bourgeois insistance on paying performance rights and the capitalist demand of theatres for us to pay for venue hire we have practically bankrupted the company. In the words of Alfred Doolittle " it's a choice between the Skilly of the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the middle class; and I haven't the nerve for the workhouse". So Shakespeare in the open air it is, then.

Unless anyone can come up with a suitable, inexpensive venue that Liverpudlians are prepared to turn out to to see a gritty tragi-comedy about the birth of the Irish Republic. If you can fit it in the Abbey Theatre, surely you can do it anywhere...

No? Not even with a Hey Nonny, Nonny? Please yourselves!!!!