I was discussing the transformative power of the theatre yesterday with a colleague.  Not simply the magic that happens onstage - although of course that's why we're all there, and is perhaps the outward and most obvious aspect of what I mean, but also the fact that - and this is especially resonant in Germany, a land where without a bit of paper to prove you can do something, it is generally not believed that you can - so many of the people working here started off as something else.  

Of the two stage managers I have worked with, one started as a singer, the other as a dancer (she has clocked an unbelievable 40 years' unbroken service here!).  The man I was talking to yesterday, a senior lighting technician, started off as a circus artiste!! 

So many people seem to have hidden aspects of themselves, career paths that doglegged somewhere in the middle, drawn instinctively into the theatre, a maelstrom of, if not precisely like minds, at least a certain multifaceted eccentricity.  

In a society where even the slightest deviation from the norm is regarded with huge suspicion, this means that the theatre is probably the only place I could actually work in Germany - and our talk brought it home to me how lucky I was to have landed up in this profession!