Curtain Up, Lights Up, Cock Up! was the original, more pithy, title for this show. “We thought the word ‘curtain’ might be a little vulgar for Sonning audiences,” actor Simon Williams explained, amid much laughter.

As both old and new titles suggest, this is a compilation of anecdotes, bon mots, and juicy stories about the world of show business. Williams, a Sonning regular (“I’m known at the Mill as: ‘Oh, it’s him again’”, we were told), devised the show himself, and delivers it in the company of fizzy Issy van Randwyck, and sometimes slightly bemused-looking Philip Pope, who also presides at the piano.

Theatrical disasters feature first. As the auditorium lights go down there are sounds of cursing from backstage – this being respectable Sonning, no expletives, of course. The stage lighting suddenly snaps on, revealing Simon Williams lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, having tripped up in the dark.

Oh, the perils of life as an actor, all the way from the little girl who prays “Please God, make me an actress” to the director who cries “No, no, get me a younger Simon Williams”, followed a few years later by “Simon Williams? Who’s he?”

Then there’s the actor’s agent, who phones up with a potential booking, not from the National, but from London Zoo. “They want me to play a gorilla,” cries the actor. But work is work, so he takes the role, only to yelp in horror as he gets tossed into the neighbouring lions’ enclosure. “Shut up, or we’ll both be out of a job,” growls the lion.

It’s Never All Right chronicles all these apocryphal stories, and many other difficulties of theatrical life. It’s not wise to get drunk before a performance, for instance. Then, at the other end of the liquid scale, there’s the problem of “drying” – actor-speak for forgetting your lines. But not every disaster is self-inflicted: there is the dastardly critic who gives you a bad review – I knew I was sitting too close to the stage when Simon Williams pointed straight at me, crying: “Look, he hasn’t written that joke down!” Deuce, say I.

The show had a slightly “it wasn’t quite ready on the night” feeling to it at the opening performance. But there’s lots of fun to be had here, and the cast works excellently together to give a thoroughly irreverent view of “a life of hide and ego-seek” as someone once described the acting profession.

n It’s Never All Right on the Night continues until February 20. Box office: 0118 969 8000 (www.millatsonning.com).