This week’s unexpected task was to write a note supporting the Playhouse on Sundays series at the Court Theatre. They’re applying for funding and wanted an audience member’s point of view to add to the application.

I’ve been to three of the readings this year: an historical pastiche about the French arrival in Akaroa, Angels by Tanya Muugututi’a  and Joy Va’ele and Simon Cunliffe’s The Truth Game.

It’s reminded me how much I enjoy rough or unfinished things: preparatory notes, the rough cartoon for a painting, the back of a piece of embroidery, the backsides of buildings. Years ago, I had a friend whose dad had decided to become a vicar at the age of 50 and was living in Wells in England to do his training. Michael took us up into the ceiling of Wells Cathedral, where the stone work gave way to heaps of rubble and rough timber. Somehow the size and grace of the place only became truly apparent when we were there. I mean, it’s big when you look up from the nave, but up there in the rough stuff, it seemed amazing: how did people build such a place from bits of rock, balanced in those little pointy medieval shoes on wooden scaffolding, no harness, no accident insurance, no OSH?  The building became compellingly real.

That’s what the Playhouse readings are like: the rough stuff is apparent, the structure is visible, the author is still very present, not absorbed into the polished fabric created by director, lighting crew and set designer. There’s just the script, a director and some human beings who have been born with that mysterious ability to turn themselves into recognisable others. (And they are indeed born with it: I used to teach children drama – it’s a gift, like playing the violin or running very fast or being able to draw. Some know instinctively how to act at the age of 5, while most of us don’t, and I don’t know why.) I love watching a bunch of people wander in, one taking off a motorcycle helmet, another eating a chicken wrap, then all settling down to persuade us that we’re in a newspaper office and these are the people there: the crusty old reporter, the bright new management person, the idealistic young newcomer, the standard journalistic alcoholic who is about to be dumped from doing the wine report. I love the way you exist in a space where you know it’s just a play and where you can also slip into that suspension of disbelief. And all this is done on nothing: a bare theatre and some actors who are paid shamefully little for their talents.

I spent eight years of my life studying drama, directing plays, reading plays, acting in plays, reading drama theory, writing theses on plays, but I’d forgotten until this years Playhouse series how very much I love it: that magical hoopla that is live theatre.