THE show must go on, the saying goes.

And that’s exactly what happened at Salisbury Playhouse in the opening week of The Recruiting Officer.

It must be every director’s nightmare – you’re staging a big in-house production that you’ve put your all into, and then one of your leading actors falls and hurts his back right before the show opens.

With a cast of just ten and no one spare to understudy, what do you do?

In this case the solution reached by Gareth Machin was to go on himself.

It was a brave decision – and the only alternative was presumably to cancel, which would bring its own set of problems.

Machin not only had to face the audiences while holding a script he hadn’t had time to learn, but the curtain opened to his character standing alone in the middle of the stage. Daunting even for a theatre professional.

It was undoubtedly distracting for the audience to see a character on stage reading from a script, but Machin did his best to use it as a prop as well as a prompt (luckily the sergeant he was playing had a lot of use for lists of men recruited) and to imbibe the character with life.

However, the show wasn’t up to the usual standard of the Playhouse’s own productions.

How much of this was down to such a last minute setback, I don’t know.

It can’t have helped, but the opening few nights of a play can be bumpy anyway, and staging a Restoration comedy is a risk in its own right, as they can appear outdated and are not to everyone’s taste.

But the Playhouse under Machin’s artistic direction has never shied away from a challenge, and according to a colleague who saw another production of this play a few years back, it was “the funniest thing I’ve ever seen”.

In this case, the play on the night I saw it was lacking the excellence I’ve come to expect – but when you’ve built up a reputation for excellence then just 'good' can be a disappointment.

And there was plenty in this production that was good.

The show still has several weeks to run, and if I had to put money on a group of people being able to get over an early hiccup and get better, I’d see those at Playhouse as a pretty good bet.