So, this week I learned how to use QLab, Syphon, Black Hole, a Terminal hack plus CamTwist to send a pre-recorded video into a Zoom call as if it's live.

They didn't teach me that stuff in drama school.

It's breathtaking how quickly we're all having to skill-up, and I'm enormously grateful to all the people who are generously sharing knowledge, such as Angel Exit, Unlimited Theatre, Ovo, and the extraordinarily brilliant Joshua Pharo.

It's exhausting and exhilarating. And it's so so worth it.

We just delivered our interactive Number Board adventure to eight classes in one day at a Primary PRU. From his parents' downstairs toilet in North Wales, award-winning certified genius Seiriol Davies inspired childish giggles and adult guffaws as “Dr Ernest Volcano”. From my spare room in Lancaster, I pretended to be his hands whilst pressing go on QLab. And from her RSC digs in Stratford, the amazing Avita Jay held it all together, inspiring those kids to stretch their brains and save the day.

I don't know how many of those kids have been to the RSC recently. I'm making an appalling assumption, probably, but I suspect not many. If any.

It's astonishing how much better this awful time feels when you get to see kids like those experience performance delivered by brilliant artists like Seiriol and Avita.

Anyway. Stop being sentimental, Punshon.

We've solved some of the “front of house” issues we were having, and discovered some new ones.

Inspired by Angel Exit's Super Spy Adventure, we found a better way of exiting a session. Astro-bot, our rogue killer robot, might be tracking the call! So we all have to leave the session together: hovering our fingers over the “leave” button, we count down together. “3, 2, 1 – byeeeee!” Much cleaner and more satisfying. (In fact, Seiriol and Avita hit “stop video”, so I can shout from Lancashire to bring them back out of hiding when the audience have safely gone.)

On a Zoom call it's tricky for performers to manage interactions with a group: you can't point to the child you're inviting to speak. One teacher suggested we put big numbered labels on each child – but we felt deeply uncomfortable at the idea of calling on “child number 7”!

We partially solved this by having each class give themselves a “laboratory name”, and asking teachers to send us those plus lists of first names before each session. That made it easer for Dr Dey to match names to faces: “Yes, someone in Super Slime Lab has an idea! Professor Logan, what do you think?”

With small PRU classes, this worked well. However, we want to move on to full classrooms: watch this space as we grapple with some potential solutions....

We're spending the summer working on a full narrative arc: We're Stuck as a series of episodes to be delivered in over several weeks this autumn term (and hopefully beyond).

If you know a school who might be interested in hosting the adventure, do let us know: thanks to our ACE funding we can offer generously subsidised rates for several weeks' worth of curriculum-linked creative maths activity.

And if you or someone you know is also exploring live, interactive, digital theatre, we would love to hear more – and very happy to share more detail on our process if useful.

More soon...

 I had to sack my husband this week.

(Not from being my husband. From a project. This project, to be exact.)

Dan Bye's been involved since the very beginning. He was part of initial workshops at Ovalhouse, devising sessions at Shoreditch Town Hall and the Unicorn Theatre, endless schools workshops across south London, two rehearsal periods and national tours. The show would not have been what it was without him.

Not just in the “he asked great questions” kind of way: I remember him and Seiriol sitting in a corner giggling as one of them typed up a ridiculous scene they'd just devised together, which is in the current script almost word for word.

Dan's ability to immediately put an audience at ease, his warmth with all kinds and ages of child, his absolute liveness and genuine responsiveness. His daft jokes and terrible Dad dancing. All written into the fabric of the thing, essential to its operation.

But he's out.

Of the digital version, anyway.

It came down to economics.

We're committed to We're Stuck: the digital adventure reaching the kinds of kids who are most likely to be in need of its joyful message of resilience and optimism. The ones who get marked down due to unconscious bias, who don't think STEM is for “people like them”.

So we're going into schools.

We've had some hugely enjoyable family audience tests, and we may yet do more. But the barriers to booking an unfamiliar Zoom adventure starring no-one off the telly are high, and we've no reason to believe that future audiences are likely to be any less white and arts-savvy than the small test audiences we've had fun with so far.

The pattern will be familiar to anyone who's ever worked on a children's show that isn't on at Christmas and isn't Peppa Pig or Something Else Off The Telly: schools audiences gloriously diverse; family audiences overwhelmingly white and middle-class.

So the focus has to be schools.

We're hopeful and excited about this. For years, I've been part of conversations where venues and companies worry increasingly desperately about the problem of persuading schools off-site: for many schools, with budgets getting tighter and tighter, getting out to a theatre show is off-puttingly expensive even before you add in the cost of coaches and the hassle of travel. So to be able to dive straight into the school, Zooming into the classroom via the interactive whiteboard: there's a genuine opportunity here. Plus it's hopefully more appealing for performers than traditional TIE: no getting up at 6am to unload a van, do several shows in an acoustically-challenging hall before loading everything back in again. Win-win, surely?

And yet the economic model is still enormously challenging.

At the moment we're in the privileged position of using an Emergency Arts Council grant to create this digital experience. But can we make it sustainable beyond this brief window, without subsidy?

Our brilliant actors need to be paid – say, £150 per day. Not a particularly generous rate to deliver 6-8 twenty minute “shows” in a day, when you might only have one of those days in a week. The company needs to market, schedule, pay invoices for each series.

How much can schools afford to pay for several weeks of curriculum-linked creative content?

Not much.

So as with every show I've ever created, the number of live actors becomes the key parameter.

We're getting creative with this: as I wrote last week, working out ways to mix pre-recorded with live means we can have more than two characters on screen at once. It means characters played by the same actor can talk to each other, allowing for even more exciting plot twists.

And there came a point when I realised: we can do this without Dan. It'll be more affordable, easier to schedule, PLUS the audio quality will be better with fewer people on each Zoom.

So that's what we're doing.

His characters have been written out, though some of his jokes remain. We're negotiating a payment for Intellectual Property Rights. And on we go. It'll be fine. I'm excited to work on this new version of the project, and know that Dan totally gets it.

But I keep thinking about the economic model. Of the problem of subsidy versus “sustainability”. Of the problem of liveness, which is so horribly expensive and yet the thing I yearn for desperately whenever I make myself sit and watch the latest streamed show.

(Dan gets it. His latest piece is entirely digital yet genuinely live, and features no expensive performers whatsoever: I heartily recommend trying it.)

I keep thinking of how the economic model theatres have been striving towards for years – less and less subsidy, more and more box office – recently collapsed, and for a brief window those who rely more on subsidy seemed more robust than those who've been brilliantly successful at building other income streams.

I'm all in favour of selling tickets, I'm absolutely not suggesting we shouldn't be striving to sell as many as possible to as wide an audience as possible. We need to value our work, be proud and know it is worth spending money on, that if they can afford to, people are willing to pay good money for a brilliant night out, and if you can't get a big enough section of your local community to buy tickets in your theatre you need to take a long hard look at whether you're actually providing a good enough night out.

But we also need to acknowledge that even hard-nosed commercial producers require subsidy to make their shows.

And also. Kids like the ones I met last week in a PRU have a right to experience fucking brilliant theatre. They deserve it. And they absolutely can't pay for it.

There is no viable economic model for providing world-class theatre to those kids. Whoever pays for it won't get their money back.

Not in cash. Their return will be paid in something far more precious.