OLD theatres exert an extraordinary power over us. Whether it is a restored beauty like the historic theatres at Bath, Bristol, Bury St Edmunds or Richmond North Yorkshire, or the eerily dilapidated old Hippodrome at Great Yarmouth, we are drawn to them.

Some – even the most carefully restored – have ghosts, while others are full of memories to which our imagination often lends a presence. Amid the peeling posters and the dusty old velvet curtains, we seem to hear the voices of actors, directors and stage-hands all around us, the creak of stage machinery, a footstep on a creaking floorboard …

As theatres close – austerity, funding problems, loss of Arts Council grants, falling audiences, you name it – the plight of one run-down old building could go unnoticed. But director-writer Peter has a plan to save the Atheneum and he has recruited a talented team of thespians to help.

After a prologue in which a young guide brings a group of visitors on a tour of the theatre, as the bulldozers and wrecking balls wait in the wings, the play proper starts with Millie, a keen young actress, coming on stage, flexing her knees and arms, making shapes and generally behaving in a slightly naive actorish way. Next arrives a bustling woman of a certain age, a famous actress in her own right, Marjorie is fed up to the back teeth with being mistaken for her younger sister, DAME Margaret …

Dee, all swirling skirts and hair and promises to “read your cards”, soon settles in for a good old gossip with Marjorie, focusing particularly on the director’s new squeeze, the Black Widow, aka the much-married glamorous Gabrielle. Eventually, after the older actresses have gone to find a coffee, the lovebirds arrive, and the scene is set for the rehearsal to start … but where is Larry, the revered old actor?

The basic premise of Peter’s play – it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a script as it is merely bullet points – is to recreate the life of the old theatre, by staging a play in three acts, with each act a pantomime from a particular year. Pantomime is important in this theatre because it is where Dan Leno gave one of his famous Widow Twankey performances, and the old music hall star apparently sits up in the grand circle watching his successors.

So it’s a play within a play within a play in a theatre that is literally falling down around them, with a cast of archetypes and some very odd and unexplained goings on. At one point Larry is taken over by Hamlet, while Millie finds herself subsumed by the malevolent Elias Splitfoot, sometime actor, director and crony of the notorious Aleister Crowley, practitioner of the dark arts. Peter himself at one point gives voice to the anger and anguish of Howard Aitkinson, an actor who lost his head (tragically and literally) in a trolly bus accident, while his grieving widow takes over Marjorie.

At this point you might be thinking playwright Steve McAuliffe is going for a fairly classic, atmospheric ghost story. But it’s not that straightforward – Millie even convinces her fellow actors that they may all be figments of an unknown creator’s imagination, actors doomed endlessly to replay their roles in a doomed theatre.

This is a play for lovers of the theatre – and the more you know, the more you can enjoy the in-jokes, not only about great performers who have trodden the boards, from Dan Leno to Sir John Gielgud, but the demands of Peter Brook and Joan Littlewood, the merits of Stanislavski, the traditions and superstitions of pantomime and the Scottish play and so much more.

It is very complicated but if you just relax and let the excellent performances and often very funny dialogue carry you along, the peculiarities, implausible props and utter improbabilities merge into a really entertaining evening.

In a wonderful cast, Jerome Swan is brilliant as the old ham, Larry (any comparison with another Larry would be unfair), Alex Chase has never been better as Peter, Nicky Porter squeezes every ounce of style and lofty detachment from glamorous Gabbie, Wendy Ibbotson and Rebecca Greenway are genuinely funny and bang on the nail with their contrasting actress characters and Rebecca Foley gets the maximum out of Millie – part ingenue, part sinister time traveller. Harvey Cormack is the tour guide at the start and the workman in the finale.

Joni de Winter directs with a strong and experienced eye for every nuance and movement. It’s a bit of a curate’s egg as a play but as a vehicle for a talented company it is certainly on the money. And huge congratulations to the arts centre’s technical and back-stage crew. This must be one of the most demanding shows they have done and it was a triumph.

This play was originally performed two years ago at Wincanton, when it impressed my fellow reviewer. She thought the ending needed some work – it certainly now has a more coherent finale, but it is very much in the spirit of the play that we are left to make up our own minds …

FC