THE fire scene in The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice is supposed to happen in the second half. Instead a real fire broke out on the Joseph Rowntree Theatre stage only two minutes into the opening night of the Rowntree Players’ production in York on Wednesday.

“Get out of the bed, Grace,” interjected on-looking director Nik Briggs, instructing lead actress Grace Lancaster to vacate the bedroom of Robert Readman’s set design, now that a blanket was alight, triggering the fire alarm.

“Take a step forward, Jeanette,” he told fellow actress Jeanette Hunter in the same breath. “Cast, clear the stage.”

Two members of the stage management team on duty at the Haxby Road theatre quickly extinguished the flames and the ushers equally quickly moved the 100-strong audience into the chill night air, where they lined up on the pavement until the performance was allowed to continue 15 minutes later, once health and safety checks had been carried out. The York fire service did not need to attend.

Explaining what caused the fire, Mr Briggs said: “A spark must have hit something on the stage when we did the first black-out in the play.

The stage effects involving a fuse box blowing had all been fine at the tech [technical] and dress rehearsal, so we’ve been looking into what went wrong as everything was positioned correctly.”

Mr Briggs was speaking yesterday afternoon, before a decision had been taken on whether the stage effects would be re-introduced for the rest of this week’s run, but he said “we might have to slightly change it”.

Wednesday’s performance passed off without further incident, restarting at the play’s beginning “once the actors had cleared their heads”.

“I’ve never had an experience quite like that before,” said Mr Briggs. “But from my own stage-show experience, I knew it was up to me to get my actors out of there as quickly as possible.

“In the second half there were supposed to be two stage effects that went off for the fire scene, but we decided not to use them and did the scene with dry ice and sound instead.”

The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice will run until tomorrow.