What impressed me so much - apart from the competence of those performances - what SHOCKED me into an awareness of English deficiencies - was the make-up of the Audiences. The halls were jampacked on every occasion, but that was not all. Eavesdropping on conversations in the intervals, I heard very little social chit-chat, but exciting analyses of what we had just seen and comparisons with other performances. In this, there was nothing highfalutin, no cut-glass accents, these were ordinary poetic people who knew considerably more about "d'drama" than this old hack.

It is difficult for the guilty parties to accept that live Theatre in England seems - over many decades of unconscious snobbery (often of the reverse kind) - to have been hijacked by a relatively small section of the community.

Take a look around the foyer during the interval to see what I mean. Better still, run a questionnaire designed to reveal the identities of your Audience-members, their addresses (for mail-shots later) and also their occupations. I suspect that the majority of our Audiences have come from up-market areas occupied by "the professional classes", thinkers and doers who have earned a certain status. Don't upset them, we need these people to pay for our theatres right now. The problem is that their knowledge and style tends to intimidate other Audience members from the more artisan sectors. We need them too.

Take a look around the auditorium during the performance, count the empty seats and consider how many performances have been arranged in accordance with "demand". Compare that attendance with the number of adult residents in our catchment area, then wonder why so many local people stayed away and did not even THINK about buying a ticket for the play.

Yet, the people are out there in their thousands. "They" attend sports events, particularly soccer, and "they" watch television. Take one of last Saturday's matches in football's Division Three, any one, at random. Last Saturday, by the way, was a dismal drizzly day with temperatures around freezing. 3,222 people sat in the open air to watch Exeter lose to Hartlepool, 2-0. More than three thousand people dressed up warm and left their comfy homes, where several television channels were churning out a variety of dross. Many of those 3,222 people travelled the length of the country and they all paid substantial sums of money to watch twenty-two men kicking a ball around a field.

Could it be that we have something to learn by examining and analysing the attractions of football? I confess that this thought suggested itself many years ago when I was running a touring theatre company. I took my kids to watch Arsenal play Southampton at Highbury. They had an Audience of about 40,000 people, all watching a drama unfold on the field of play. I remember wistfully gazing into one small section of that crowd and thinking what a wonderful Audience it would make, if only I could discover what had attracted them.

Later that day, those football fanatics either went dahn the pub or stayed at home to watch TV. Less than sixty other people sat in a 200-seat auditorium to watch a sophisticated comedy by Noel Coward, brilliantly staged and beautifully performed by a cast of trained actors who gave of their best. We did not stop our performance with infuriating frequency - or at all - to bombard our Audience with advertisements for products they didn't need, or trailers for forthcoming presentations. We did, however, suck lemons at half-time.

Naturally, to attract all those missing people to our performances, we have to get the material right; that's obvious. Theatre companies up and down the land have expended vast resources on trying to discover how to get bums on seats, yet they have not sacrificed their need to perform challenging material by culturally acceptable playwrights. Indeed, some have succeeded in attracting more people into their Audiences. Some.

We know that Audiences enjoy something with which they can identify. We know that Noel Coward will appeal to those of the professional classes, but doubt if his work would attract 0.5% of the crowd at Arsenal. We know that Shakespeare, Ayckbourn, panto and anything full of sex and laughs can fill the theatre... we know all this. But still our auditoria often are populated sparsely, and by loyal people who would never behave badly at football matches.

So, here's an answer that I know works: if the potential Audiences won't come to us, we perfect what we're good at - entertainment - and take it to them. We hone samples of our work and perform it in pubs, in clubs, in schools, in churches, in community halls and - if all else fails - out on the street. Out there, by the way, it needs to be something fantastic, that could not possibly happen in a city street. We let the people see what most of them have been missing (so it had better be good). We work hard to bring more and more people back into our theatres.

Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".