They go into store to appear repainted or recovered at a later date. "We are often in negotiation with the designer to re- use props we have in store. When Gerald Scarfe designed a psychiatrist's couch as a reclining naked woman for Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, it was the props department that had to make her come true (in foam rubber and leather) and stand up (or rather lie down) to the rigours of nightly use.Props involve both practicality and compromise as the budget is always tight "We try to re-use as much as possible. Her staff (including a former motor mechanic from Australia) works from a large converted warehouse in Limehouse, East London There's no stage glamour here Function is the key, and craftsmanship "We are artisans as opposed to artists," says Cannell. At one dramatic death climax, someone's cloak knocked down a row of cardboard cut-out tankards on an insubstantial table: we cried with laughter.) Ivy Cannell has been working in the business of disbelief-suspension for the past 30 years.

As props-making manager for English National Opera (with a brief spell at the Royal Opera in the Seventies), she runs the workshop producing anything from plaster-of-Paris chocolates or plastic lobster to Renaissance statues that wouldn't look amiss in the Louvre. (Bad props can cause total audience hysteria, as in a memorable production of Macbeth at the Oxford Playhouse. Props (short for properties) basically cover everything that ends up on stage apart from the set and the singers. They also "prop up" the action and, in their own quiet way, can become protagonists in the drama: the handkerchief in Otello, the pin in The Marriage of Figaro, the severed head of John the Baptist in Salome.