Up close and personal

When I was 16 I was cast as the lead in the joint-school musical with the school next door. Rehearsals were the highlight of my week, and I made friends for life. But I hadn't, by 16, been quite so successful in other aspects of my life, and so my first kiss – albeit a relatively chaste one – took place in a strip-lit music room with a chap I barely knew and watched by a male Drama teacher from the boys' school. It wasn't a traumatic experience, but it was awkward.

Many productions mounted in schools require a degree of physical intimacy like this, and some teachers will choose to cut it out or find a way around – but it isn't unreasonable to expect older teenagers to perform roles which require this kind of interaction, and the world has moved on a little in the 17 years since my co-star and I stood in that music room, so now it's something to which drama teachers are better equipped to give thought.