“We are players, and we love an audience. Sometimes, if a play is going badly, it is easy to think of the audience as an enemy, but truly they are part of the play, because an audience changes the way we perform. We can rehearse a play for weeks, as we were doing with Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the moment when the playhouse is filled with people, so the play is transformed. There is a new nervousness, but also an energy. We often ran a whole play in the theatre without any audience, simply as a rehearsal, and often it would be dull and dreary, grown stale by too much rehearsal, yet next day, with two thousand people gaping at the stage, it would come alive.” Fools and Mortals, by Bernard Cornwell