Back from a restorative Easter break at home, and it finally looks like Spring has arrived in Ludlow. The lambs are gambolling in the fields, the company are building a chocolate egg mountain in the kitchen, and suddenly we’re in tech week. After a month of creating the characters, finding the style and discovering how to play the fast-paced scenes of this new work, we’re into the business end of putting on the production. Costumes are adjusted for quick changes, props (and there are plenty) that were previously mimed now arrive in abundance, and we even have to learn how to pack our touring set of half a marquee, lighting rig and stage rostra into the back of a sprinter van. Oh, and remember to do some acting, too.

Last week we tried our first ‘stagger through’ of the entire show with props and costume. I love this term, used for the initial attempt to run a play still in rehearsal. Actors are always nervous and a little vulnerable at this stage, like Edward Scissorhands looking forlornly at his Black and Decker digits and saying “I’m not finished!” Our handling of objects is about as adept as his - in fact it’s no coincidence that a ‘stagger through’ sounds like a cross between teaching an infant to walk and watching a drunk negotiate his way to the toilet. The results are very similar: limbs are flung about awkwardly, words spill out of us with little regard to the script or even the English language, and occasionally we find ourselves halfway through a scene with no idea how we got there, or why.

Fortunately, unlike an inebriate trying to make toast in a microwave, it gets better with practice. Soon we know roughly what’s happening when, with whom, and occasionally why – and that’s when we begin, during our many audience asides, actually addressing our director, associate director, stage manager, and whoever else has been dragged in to watch.

If there’s one rule onstage it’s that in a crowd of beaming faces your gaze will always land on the one who looks like you’ve just peed all over their daffodils… That face is all you see, and very quickly you can become paranoid, or if you’re a comedian, inappropriately aggressive. I’ve witnessed several very experienced stand-ups alienate an entire audience because they were fixated by the ‘wrong’ reaction of a punter in the back row – it’s a sensitivity that comics share with teachers and brutal military dictators. Anyway, as our lines are written for us, we just get quietly and hysterically neurotic, mouthing the words as our eyeline drifts up over their heads as we plan a swift exit before the Theatre Police SWAT team burst in through the windows with flash bangs and, presumably, a much funnier replacement cast.

It turns out that some people don’t constantly smile when they’re listening, others have faces that ‘just fall like that’ in repose, and talking to an imaginary audience eight feet above the real one doesn’t make them feel terribly involved. Other than that we’re pretty good shape, according to Orla. Ah well, you live and learn.

Of course, after four weeks it’s hard to find the same joke funny, but sometimes a new element will inject the fun back into proceedings. Brian Viner is a great storyteller, and does an excellent line in anecdotes with slightly smutty double entendres in his book. One of the true tales we recount is of a terribly straight academic couple who stayed in the holiday cottage and left behind their bedroom game dice with actions and body parts. In the play the faces read “Hands, thigh, bottom”, but the dice we use are less coy, and the first run with them last week resulted in Sarah and I speechless … Well, you try saying the word ‘stomach’ while the anatomical name for the male appendage stares at you in proud gold lettering, daring you to read it aloud.

First Night: From playing to an audience of five at Pentabus, we find ourselves in the capacious 250 seat Walker Studio at Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury. Seeing our little set on the floor is quite intimidating. This will be the largest venue on the tour, and it is sold out for the World Premiere. Yikes! We need to hit the ground running, or rather, the rostra – since a sightline issue required several hours rebuild by our tireless stage management and crew. How will a real audience respond, will they respond at all? Will they like the stage Brian? More to the point, will the real Brian (attending with the whole family) like his stage alter ego? As Capable Woman in the play would wisely say “Only time will tell, Mr Viner.”

In the event Nick, who adapted the book into the play, seemed very pleased with our efforts, which was a relief, as he and his wife had generously given us all wonderful first night gifts, as well as an edible farmyard of foam pigs and chocolate tractors. Then the man himself shook us firmly by the hand and professed himself really impressed. Jane and the kids were there too, apparently Sarah’s rendition of her swearing was absolutely spot on, and the kids were all remarkably at ease with yet another incarnation of their lives 8 years ago being played out. Iain, who plays all three children using indicative bits of costume, chatted to them about their reactions. The only one not completely taken with their doppelganger was Eleanor, and I have to say that in her place I wouldn’t be thrilled to be portrayed by an actor in his 20’s wearing a flowery hair band. Though to be fair, he did remove it for the after show drinks.

End of Week 1: Following Theatre Severn we played our smallest venue (57) at Clee St Margaret, and Clun. Both venues were packed to the rafters with a warm audience, vindicating the decision to take this show to the people rather than expecting them to drive to a central theatre, and in both our hosts made us very welcome and fed us some delicious homemade dinner (if soldiers march on their stomachs, actors perform on whatever free scraps of food they’re offered, and so far we’ve been spoiled rotten). Now all we have to do is take our portable marquee into the various village halls of the region and see how audiences there take to the stories of a ‘bugger from off’, and improve on our get-out time of dismantling and packing the set. With luck we won’t have Saturday’s setback again, when the sprinter van got stuck in the mud outside the hall and required 3 burly men (me, Iain and Simon the SM) plus the prop rope from the set to tow it out. It’s lucky that Sean, Iain and I had done a proper physical workout before the show. Incidentally, if anyone happened to see three grown men on a roundabout at about 6.30pm in the adventure playground at Clun, that’s what it was – the very serious process of an actor’s warm up….

Matthew Bates - Brian Viner in Tales of the Country