Before you ask: no. The play does not last 24 hours. I imagined something similar upon my arrival at the Abbey Theatre on Sunday evening, sleeping bag under one arm. The 24 Hour Plays are a series of short pieces constructed over the space of 24 hours by some of Dublin’s biggest names in theatre. This includes designers, writers, actors, directors and the like, and once a year in aid of Dublin Youth Theatre, the Abbey gives up it’s stage, and the artists give up their time, and three hours of fun is had.

So how does it work? At 8pm on Day One, Saturday evening, the whole cast and crew gather in The Peacock Theatre below the Abbey and lay out the stimuli. There are six directors and six writers, who are already paired together, and the actors come forward and tell these three duos a) one thing they’ve never done onstage and b) one special skill. These can range from a) dying onstage and b) doing a backflip, to a) kicking down doors and doing somersaults á la classic-eighties-cop and b) cracking knuckles (all of which are actual examples from Sunday’s show). One object is also chosen from a selection that the actors bring from home. The actors then leave and have a lengthy beauty sleep whilst the directors and writers fight it out for the actors and the object that they want, before writing their pieces. At 8am on Sunday the actors gather on the Abbey stage to be cast and begin rehearsal and learning (sometimes lengthy) lines. After lunch, each show gets a twenty minute tech time (which, if you are in the theatre, understand is a nail-bitingly short amount of time). Come 7.30pm the audience is brought in and the shows go up.

So does it work? Yes. The fact that it’s for charity means that the community element of the show is amplified. There were adlibs, forgotten lines and mix ups, but the audience were on side and it was all part of the fun. In fact, the stand out show for me was Welcome To The Weatherdome by Tara Flynn and directed by Donnacadh O’Briain, simply because of how self-conscious it was of the conditions it was performing in. “Come and join me on this tiny bridge” cooed the dystopian overlord, ‘The Great Lad’ (played by Dennis Conway). Conway was in fact standing on a small and seemingly ridiculous bridge that was left by the Abbey’s set design from their current production of You Never Can Tell.

The crowd seems to be similar every year – theatre goers and patrons of the arts as well as previous members of Dublin Youth Theatre and friends and family of those participating. Some audience members admitted to finding this alienating, suggesting that the jokes were too exclusive, but I actually found the opposite. Knowing that each piece had to adhere to strict rules, it was always hilarious when it became clear what an actor’s special skill was, or which object in the scene was the out of place and ridiculous one chosen.

The show begins and is punctuated by performances from a live musical act, this year being the treacle-toned and perfectly harmonised band, The Evertides, who themselves penned a song in twenty four hours as tribute to the acts that they shared the stage with. This only added to the ensemble element of the show, in which everyone brought their various talents and expertise together to do something good. Not only does the night raise a significant amount of money (this year the target was €50,000) but it also demonstrates the incredible community that exists within theatre for the many children from Dublin Youth Theatre that were in attendance.