Actor to director and back again

Friday, 52 Fitzroy Street, W1: here is Vivien Goodwin, American managing director of the country's largest theatrical bookshop and publisher, Samuel French. She was up at 5am to run, will be at the theatre scouting new plays tonight, and will get home late to her six-year-old daughter and retired schoolteacher househusband, all as normal.

Sunday, down an alley at the back of Beech Walk in Crayford, Kent: here is Vivien Goodwin, as Mary in Shelagh Stephenson's bitter comedy The Memory of Water, taking part in all-day run-throughs at the Geoffrey Whitworth Theatre. It's her first time back on stage in this amateur theatre for nearly three years.

Goodwin was the golden girl from California who came to London at 20 to act. Somewhere along the line she gave up (perhaps too easily discouraged, she now admits), and went to Samuel French as a junior secretary. She turned her passion and loneliness towards amateur theatre.

The theatre is hidden on an old allotment site behind a row of small, terraced houses in which people are busy with roses and climbers on this warm afternoon. The building went up in 1959: solid red brick.

No one would call it inviting. But an early Lottery grant has made possible a raked auditorium with plush velvet seats for 150, professional-standard lighting and dressing rooms, and a full rehearsal studio.

Amateur theatre, though, is about more than facilities: it's about letting imagination fly; about friendship, warmth, belonging. At GWT, anyone can audition, anyone can jostle to direct, everyone shares the jobs. As Maureen, membership secretary and retired secretary in a merchant bank, puts it: "In amateur theatre, there are no prizes for hard work."

There are eight or nine productions a year. Competition for leading roles is fierce, especially among women. Vivien joined the theatre 17 years ago and got her break when someone had to pull out of Crimes of the Heart because they were moving.

She met her husband at the GWT; they married 13 years ago. ("As a director, he never casts me ...").

As someone who spends much of her time coolly assessing professional theatre, she sees the best of GWT as close to the London fringe. But its real appeal is something that died with small town provincial rep - the sense of getting to know the actors, of feeling part of the theatre. Seats are £5, programmes 25p, coffee 60p. You don't get that from the Really Useful Group.

Tickets for The Memory of Water are for Geoffrey Whitworth Theatre Club members only. To join, telephone 01322 526390.