When I was about 18, I was lucky enough to go to see my brother, who lived in Santiago, in Chile. We spent four weeks in the mountains, being rancheros. We were staying in a tiny village in the Andes, high up, writes Flora Montgomery.

It was Easter week, and when we came down to a little village to go to church, a group of travelling actors arrived. There were two Irish people and an American and a Dutch guy. The rest were all Chileans. They just turned up and put on a play outdoors.

They had big pieces of silk, in blues and reds and yellows. They put on an adventure play, like a Greek adventure. They got the children in the village to be all the things, like the sky, with bits of white around them, and the sun, with yellow silk.

The pieces of silk were about 20 feet long and five feet wide; they got the kids to sit underneath and ripple them above their heads, to make the sea.

It was about two hours of everybody being the music and everybody being the chorus; the crowd and the children and players created a wonderful play we all joined in with.

Everyone had such good fun. This was theatre in its most real form. There was no film set or enormous auditorium. It was just people who turned up to entertain. They weren't looking for money and they hadn't a message. They came to entertain for the day.

Ever since then, I've realised that theatre is just entertainment. You don't need all the things we rely on to create the magic those actors did. How wonderful it was that there was no expectation of a return: it was just travelling actors bringing fantasy to people.

In conversation with Victoria White

Flora Montgomery is in Neil LaBute's The Shape Of Things, which previews at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, from January 31st and opens on February 5th