Calling all StageSiders, welcome back to another article here at StageSideUK. It feels like it has been ages since I just put finger to key and let the stream of consciousness flow. In this article, that is exaclty what I do. Chaotically, this article talks about how a love for theatre (as an actor, writer, viewer or participant) often stems from experiences as a child. I touch on moments of my experiences from nativities to year 6 plays, going to the theatre as a teen or experiencing the world of critic and reviewer nights. So settle in, grab your brew and let’s unpack how a love for theatre really starts, and why it contradicts the way we talk about typical theatre audiences in 2026.
DISCLAIMER: I mention the West End a fair bit, I am not hating on the West End. Some folk live close to it and I don’t doubt that during their childhood they do see West End shows as their local theatre of choice. For me, up North, this wasn’t ever a possibility. I write this from a Northern perspective so I use the West End as a comparrison. Swap this out for touring local theatre, regional host theatre or festival site should you so wish, the idea is still the same.
Somewhere in most of our attic’s or loft’s, there’s a photo. Slightly blurry, taken on an early digital camera that made everyone look faintly orange with demonic eyes and the classic timestamp watermark that makes you realise you are older than you feel. In it, a child is dressed as a shepherd, a star or an innkeeper. Most of the people in that photo won’t grow up to work in theatre at all. Wether on stage or off, most people will find that their love for theatre fades away as new trends come in or they simply can’t access theatre or performances on an ongoing basis. A handful will work in some capacity within the industry. But almost all of them will remember their theatrical experience, in some form, for the rest of their lives and that’s exactly why the photo matters more than it looks like it should.
Theatre doesn’t usually grab people through a glossy poster with a television star cast announcement or a £150 ticket somewhere in the room, next to a way cheaper seat for the same view. It grabs them young, cheap, and slightly chaotic, in a school hall, a church or a community centre, long before anyone’s thinking about “the arts” as a philosophical concept at all. And if we’re honest about how that spark actually gets lit, it should completely change how we talk about who theatre is “for.”
The Nativity Isn’t a Warm-Up Act, It’s the Whole Show
There’s a habit, in how theatre gets discussed, of treating school plays, nativities and am-dram productions as cute but “not the proper show”. A rite of passage everyone politely endures before “real” “serious” theatre starts. But that framing gets it backwards.
For a huge number of people, the nativity or the Year 6 leavers’ show, or the am-dram musical your nan dragged you to, isn’t a lesser version of theatre. It is theatre. It’s the first time they understood that a room full of people could go quiet together, laugh together, and feel something on cue, because of what was happening on a stage in front of them. The local press reviewer wasn’t there. No one paid for a “premium” ticket to feel superior about it afterwards. It was just alive, slightly wonky, and completely captivating if you were eight years old and had one line to remember.
That experience matters just as much, arguably more, than a polished professional production, because it’s usually unfiltered. Nobody’s worrying about “getting into theatre” as a hobby or an identity at that age. You’re just in it. And whether that feeling turns into a career, an occasional trip to the theatre twenty years later, or just a soft spot whenever you hear a choir, it started in the exact same place.
Why the Early Stuff Sticks When the Expensive Stuff Doesn’t
Psychologically, this isn’t surprising. The things that shape a lifelong interest are rarely the most impressive or expensive version of that thing, they’re the version you experienced with the least self-consciousness, at an age before you’d learned to be embarrassed or intimidated by it. They are also the things you get to connect with. If you placed a un-named smart device, or a light up slinky infront of a child these days, sadly I believe the tech would win, rewind to the 90s and I strongly feel like the slinky would win because we would interact with it, play with it and build memories. I mean, ask me about how many times I threw my slinky on the shed roof to watch it roll down… but I couldn’t tell you my first mobile phone… Anyways, back to the topic.
Theatre, more than most art forms, depends on this early, low-stakes access. You can’t really “sample” theatre the way you sample a song on a playlist or scroll past a photograph online. It asks something of you, for your attention and a bit of patience, and that’s a much easier ask when you’re a kid clapping for your mate who forgot to come on stage at the right time, than when you’re an adult worrying about whether you’re dressed right for the occasion or got the best angle for a preshow insta story.
This is also why the obsession, once it takes hold, tends to be so durable. Ask most people who genuinely love theatre, the ones who structure holidays around it, who’ll talk your ear off about a production years later, or the ones who ended up working in the industry entirely by accident, and a lot of them will trace it back to something unglamorous. A school production. A youth theatre group. A relative who took them along because there was a spare ticket. Not a red carpet and prosecco. A radiator that didn’t work and a director who was also the geography teacher.
The Problem: We Stop Treating It Like It Matters
Here’s where it gets frustrating for me. If early, accessible, unpretentious theatre is genuinely what creates lifelong audiences, and occasionally, entire careers, you’d expect the industry to protect and champion it fiercely. Reviewers, marketing agencies and theatre professionals should be banding together to shine a spotlight on community arts spaces and performances. We should be encouraging people to engage with their work, or professionals developing skills via workshops etc. Instead, it’s often treated as the bit you grow out of, charming, but not serious, not “proper” theatre, not something worth writing about or taking seriously once you’re old enough to know better.
That attitude does real damage, and quite frankly is what makes theatre exclusive. It teaches people, often without meaning to, that the theatre they loved as a kid, cheap, local, made by amateurs, teachers and volunteers, was a lesser category all along. Once they grow up they will see a “real” show, one that has lived in a static building for years or has had more cast changes than I have had school dinners. And once you’ve absorbed that idea, it’s a short step to assuming that “real” theatre exists somewhere else: somewhere further away, more expensive, more dressed-up, and frankly, not somewhere you belong unless you can afford the ticket and the train fare and the pre-theatre dinner and the hotel that seems to be compulsory now.
That’s how you lose people. Not because they stopped loving theatre, but because the version of theatre they were shown as “the real thing” felt like it wasn’t built for them.
And I know, there is a real commercial gap between St Cuthberts drama society in middlevillage middle city and London’s West End, but the commitment and passion for the arts is still there. You may not get Elphie’s big flying magical moment, but you may get a teen standing on a box belting the highest riff you have ever heard, and noone would even know because “its not the real show”.
You Don’t Need a Fancy First Theatre Memory to Have a Real One
If your first proper theatre memory is a nativity, a school panto, or an am-dram production of something slightly too ambitious for the budget, that’s not a lesser origin story. It’s the same origin story most people in this industry have, whether or not they say so out loud. For me, it was playing Josseph in the nativity for a few years before being demoted to Claude the Camel REAL QUICK. I still have nightmares about the rash I had around my neck from the awful plastic-backed faux fur my grandma used for the costume. Ask enough directors, actors, writers and critics where it started, and a precious few of them will say [insert big name] on the West End. Most will say something closer to a school hall or community stuido.
The trouble is that once people move from “audience member” or “background performner” to “industry professional” or “critic,” there can be a quiet pressure to reframe that story. To talk about theatre in terms of the shows that impressed people with money and connections, rather than the ones that made an eight-year-old in a cardboard crown feel like the most important person in the whole room for four minutes during your one line that got stumbled a goof 5 times.
Worth saying plainly: that instinct is worth resisting. The stuff that actually built your love of theatre deserves to be spoken about with the same seriousness as anything you’ve seen since, arguably more, because it did something a slicker production sometimes can’t. It made you a believer before you were sophisticated enough to be cynical about it.
It made you love theatre before you were old enough to try to find a reason not to love it. It made you stop thinking all together, and start doing. We often look at theatre as an activity, but I wonder if that perception is actually closer to a chore. Do some think of going to the theatre as a taxing evening of scrutiny or an overindulgent evening of spending money for the best instagram reel? Peraps some don’t attend due to the pressure they feel from their peers who may mock them. All of this is valid, but equally rubbish. Supporting your local community, and enjoying an evening out is a win-win in its plainest form.
Passing the Spark On, Without Gatekeeping It
If early, accessible theatre is what creates lifelong audiences and a secure industry in terms of jobs, income and sustainability, then protecting access to theatre experiences should be treated as seriously as protecting any major venue or production. That means:
- Not treating school and community theatre as a “stepping stone” to something more legitimate, but as legitimate in its own right.
- Being honest that the barriers that stop people going to theatre as adults, cost, location, feeling like an outsider, often didn’t exist the first time they fell in love with it as kids, and asking why that changed.
- Making space, in how theatre is written and talked about, for the fact that most people’s love of it started somewhere unglamorous, and that this is a strength, not a footnote.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: an industry that only takes itself seriously once the ticket price climbs into three figures is, slowly, cutting itself off from the exact experience that creates the audiences, the writers, actors, and directors, it’ll need in twenty years’ time. If everyone who will be working in theatre in 20 years time had their first theatrical experience in the glitz and glamour of theatreland, then the future of theatre seems rather isolating, bleak and dare I say boring?
The Line Nobody Remembers, and the Feeling Everybody Does
Ask someone who loves theatre what their line was in their first school production, and most people won’t remember the exact words but they may tell you the show name, who they played or trauma dump about faux fur costumes… I really can’t get over the sore neck issue ok! What they’ll remember is the feeling, the nerves, the moment the audience laughed or went quiet at the right point, and the small, electric realisation that they’d been part of making that happen. It is that electric moment that can make or break a young actor, writer, performer or tech team member.
That feeling is the entire industry, in miniature. Everything that comes after, the reviews, the ticket prices, the debates about what counts as “serious” work, it isn’t linked to theatre at all. This is business, a seperate topic and one I really can’t get into right now. But it’s worth remembering where it actually came from. It isn’t always the West End. A school hall, with terrible acoustics and a costume made from a bin bag, carboard and the cheapest scratchiest faux fur bought from the local habodashery, and someone who believed in it completely.
Have Your Say
What do you think about the term “real theatre” applying to professional shows only? Did you start out as a Nativity star? Let me know in the comments!
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