Outdoor theatre is an exciting way to watch a play, but David Walding advises visitors to this west Cornwall venue to take along some soup...

Togas billowed. Wind whistled up canvas loincloths and howled under a few gladiatorial greaves.

The camp prefect suffered first-degree goosebumps in the southwesterly gale and the rain dripped off his not-very-Roman nose as well as his Imperial-era cassis helmet.

The legionnaires were soaked and bedraggled by the second act and visibly shivering by the next.

They looked like they wanted to get back to Lombardy. Quickly.

The prefect entered stage left, then disappeared, suddenly remembering he had forgotten something.

Before we knew it, he was back with a smile on his face and a spear or period plastic ‘vine stick’ in his hand.

He looked every inch a centurion – or a British amateur dramatics enthusiast dressed up as one – but for one major blooper.

He had forgotten to take off his spectacles. Varifocal lenses were invented long after Caesar and Cleopatra’s time.

I have been to west Cornwall’s Minack Theatre many times and sat on its unforgiving granite seats suffering numb bum for the sake of art and culture. I saw The Tempest there – and it poured. Caliban got caught in a heavy squall coming off the Atlantic.

I saw Twelfth Night there, too. Malvolio got attacked by a gannet.

I also attended The Pirates of Penzance when the first entrance of Major-General Stanley was greeted by thunder and his famous comic baritone patter song sung behind a curtain of traditional Cornish mizzle.

But pluckily we stuck it out. We saw it through.

Brollies are banned in the unique theatre in southwest Britain but, luckily, soup is not.

The Minack amphitheatre (from the Cornish for ‘rocky place’ or ‘monk’ as the promontory is said to resemble a cowled head) is carved out of the cliffs of Porthcurno, four miles away from Land’s End.

The amphitheatre is carved out of the cliffs of Porthocurno, four miles away from Land’s End and was the work of one woman

It was the work of one woman: Rowena Cade.

The daughter of a mill owner, she was born in Derbyshire in 1893. After World War I, she moved to Cornwall and built a house overlooking the sea, letting a local theatre group stage A Midsummer Night’s Dream in her back garden in 1929.

Six years later, with the help of her gardener and another friend who didn’t mind heavy lifting, she had created her own outdoor theatre in the cliff face terrace beneath her heathery, gorse-grown garden.

She used to sit and read inside a wheelbarrow.

Wood washed ashore from a wrecked Spanish freighter used for the dressing rooms and the box office was made out of an old World War II anti-aircraft gun post. The earliest productions were lit by car headlights.

The 800-seat theatre – now a charitable trust – stages outdoor concerts and theatrical productions from May to September.

This year, the season includes singer-songwriter Midge Ure, Cider With Rosie, the musical Carousel, She Stoops to Conquer, Carmen, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Ladykillers, stage adaptations of novels The Grapes of Wrath and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as well as the Bard’s own King Lear (how apt the line “There is a cliff whose high and bending head...”) and Much Ado About Nothing and Chekhov’s 1896 masterpiece The Seagull.

The Minack adds a whole new level of entertainment, due to its unpredictability.

Bored by landfills and toppling over rubbish bins, the local herring gull population might strafe Konstantin.

Or, mid-performance, they may swoop down on the Russian ingenue Nina, mistaking her hair for a potential nesting site.

During Much Ado the audience might cower and shield their ice creams and picnic pasties while Benedick and Dogberry project over the crashing waves and surging surf below.

And, during Lear, just hope Cordelia doesn’t trip and tear her Achilles tendon fending off a kilo’s worth of seriously incontinent, greedy, squawking seagull. But the show will always go on and the prompter will heroically endure a sneezing fit. All for art.

Actually, in all likelihood the casts will not be disturbed by too much freak weather and the weather will be gorgeous and the sun will blaze down and the dolphins and basking sharks will pass by and everyone will get a tan.

Maybe once, a show might be interrupted by an uncast ‘extra’ in walking boots and weatherproof packable cagoule taking the wrong turning off the coastal footpath – and ending up in Messina.

For more details about Minack Theatre, go to www.minack.com or call +44 1736 810181.