Sweltering

Well, we've now got less than a week to go and things are hotting up - and I don't just mean the ridiculous temperatures in the rehearsal room this week; I'm sure I detect a little frisson between Audrey and Glenn (sound effects).

Things always get a bit fraught this close to a performance as nerves and excitement start kicking in, and there have been one or two raised voices. Halfway through rehearsal on Wednesday Gordon turned up in his overalls directly from his garage where he and his merrie band of men have been constructing the set. Everything ground to a halt as a heated discussion took place with director David over the fact that Gordon had run out of yellow paint and wasn't able to get any more. Eventually, under threat of a paintbrush being shoved where the sun don't shine, David agreed with Gordon that it would look much better if he did use burnt orange beneath the dado rail.

We have our first dress rehearsal in the theatre on Monday evening, although we have been fortunate to have had most of our costumes made for us by the redoubtable Mrs Cavendish and team, so we've been able to practice some of our quick changes already. She's done a particularly good job of making Thelma look dowdy with minimal effort.

I should point out that, as usual at this juncture, Sylvia Frobisher becomes the harbinger of doom. She wanders around saying that everything's going to be a disaster, that no one is going to come and watch it, that she's bound to forget her lines etc etc. We're used to it by now, having gone through this lark with her for every single show of the last nine years with nothing ever going wrong before. This time she says that she has had the same dream every night for a week which is obviously a premonition of bad tidings. In this dream she imagines herself watching the play whilst laying prostrate on the floor, unable to rise, while her part is played by a block of wood. One worthy of Mystic Meg, I fancy.

We shall be without our prompt and president, Dame Vivian AuFait until the dress rehearsal on Tuesday night, as she always makes her annual pilgrimage to Wimbledon for the men's final on Sunday (she used to know Fred Perry in every sense of the term). Even at her age, she insists on driving herself all the way to London and back on her own. It always amazes me that the battery in her powered wheelchair lasts the distance.