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Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.

Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.

Applause felt like approval, and it became a drug that soothed the pain, but only temporarily.

If you walk into a room and one hundred people say, 'You are a lovely, beautiful person', who isn't going to be affected by that? But you have to tell yourself not to value that. You have to tell yourself - or at least I do - to not become accustomed to hearing applause in any way, because I think that's dangerous.

I'd get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn't clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.

At some of the venues, the audience was so loud we could hardly hear what was happening on stage, which kind of threw us back to 1983, when we had very similar reactions on a much bigger scale.

Popular applause veers with the wind.

The applause is a celebration not only of the actors but also of the audience. It constitutes a shared moment of delight.

The reaction of the public plays a very important role. It gives us an adrenaline boost, especially when people start to shout and clap their hands in time with the music. That really helps us to go on.