Jay Laga'aia remembers the worst stuff-up he's ever had on stage. It happened during the long run of The Lion King, at the very beginning of a performance.

"After 500 shows, you go into a lot of automatic pilot,' he says.

Laga'aia was up on Pride Rock as Mufasa and spoke the character's opening line while wondering to himself if he had locked the car.

After concluding that he had, he realised he had lost his place in the script and dried completely.

"I didn't know where I was."

The only thing he could think of was to start again.

While the audience didn't spot anything amiss, he says, the other cast members beneath him were laughing it up: they knew.

Laga'ia - a familiar face to many from his long stint on Play School, among many other roles - is hoping nothing worse happens to him in his new play, Peter Pan Goes Wrong.

"It's one of the few shows I've worked on where if you're not really concentrating, you could get killed."

The award-winning follow-up to Mischief Theatre's previous hit, The Play That Goes Wrong, features sets collapsing and props falling down, so a wrong move could cause serious injury or worse.

"Most revolves can go at speeds up to 4.5 rpm," Laga'aia says.

"Ours goes up to 10.7."

It's just one of the perils he and his fellow cast members have to face. Clapping might bring Tinker Bell back to life, but real-life actors aren't so easily resurrected.

The set-up of Peter Pan Goes Wrong is that The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are returning with their next production, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan.

Laga'aia says of the show, "Like a lot of pro-am theatre companies, I'm the only professional called in to do a show."

But, as with the murder mystery in The Play That Goes Wrong, in the world of the show the story of the boy who wouldn't grow up becomes the play that will never go right. "Off-stage" personality clashes and rivalries as well as technical and other disasters snowball into an increasingly shambolic affair.

Laga'aia is cast as the narrator, a lost boy and a pirate, necessitating some quick costume changes (with the potential for disaster). Some actors have four or five different characters to play, which sounds even more ominous.

Regarding the narrator, he says he is playing on the recognition audience members will have of him from his longest-running role.

"I hope people initially see me as Jay, like you would in Play School."

But as everything starts to go wrong in front of him, the narrator - and Laga'ia himself - must fight to keep a straight face as the show become more and more manic and messy, with lines forgotten a phone not put on silent, and much more besides.

"By the end of it, you're hanging on for your dear life."

Laga'aia is familiar with the pro-am world from the inside: last year he played the title role in Packemin Production's Shrek the Musical.

"You come in to do five or six rehearsals even though the cast has done 10 or 11," he says.

But with this professional Australian mounting of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, it took many weeks of intense rehearsal to ensure all the technical challenges were surmounted and the actors were as safe as possible.

Laga'aia says the comedy in Peter Pan Goes Wrong is reminiscent of vaudeville shows and British TV comedies like Monty Python's Flying Circus, 'Allo 'Allo and Faulty Towers.

To set the mood, in the pre-show, 15 minutes before the chaos begins, cast members interact in character with the audience and welcome them to the show. It's an opportunity to meet the members from the Society who then play Pan, Captain Hook and the other characters in the play-within-the-play, as well as being the incompetent members of the stage crew.

Laga'aia has seen plenty of attempts to ward off stage disasters - actors learning each other's lines so they can provide each other a whispered prompt, wearing an earphone so dialogue can be supplied as needed - but fortunately for the audience, the characters involved in Peter Pan Goes Wrong show no such initiative.

Laga'aia says those watching can relate to the sinking feeling that things are going wrong and will only get worse when they see the disaster unfolding before their eyes.

Of course, it doesn't stop people enjoying it - because it's not happening to them.

"The audience is just in fits of laughter."