“It was like living through an anxiety dream – the one you have as an actor where you don’t know the lines, you don’t know what’s going on,” he says.

Given the lack of rehearsal time, it was decided that the afternoon’s performance would be the concert version – the cast sit on chairs and there is no choreography – but the newest cast members still had to remember a script’s worth of lyrics. As Owen-Jones stood in the wings, preparing to go on, his plan was simply to take it one scene at a time. “If I had started worrying about the mountain I would have to climb, I never would have done it,” he says.

Half-way through the performance, one brief memory lapse almost turned catastrophic. “I suddenly realised, ‘Oh, I don’t know this scene.’ I’d literally last looked at it six years ago and I was sitting there on-stage thinking, ‘Can I remember it?’ Suddenly your brain is doing all these incredibly fast calculations, going through the little Rolodex of all the lyrics that you’ve learned in the past, trying to find the right thing.

“So I stood up, just trusting it would come out, and then I started to sing and I realised I had literally no idea what to say. So I just made it up and amazingly it rhymed. The brain is an incredible thing. When I got back to my seat all the other actors were looking at me like: ‘What the hell did you just say?’”

Across town at the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch, 32-year-old Laura Sillett was also playing a high-stakes memory game. On December 23, she joked to her partner, who was appearing in the theatre’s festive panto Aladdin, that if more actors came down with Covid, she could step in.

“He said, ‘I’ll put it to the director and see what he says’. And Doug [director Douglas Rintoul] said, ‘Let’s get her in tonight.’”