CAST

The "Characters":

Father - Alex van der Velden
Mother - Sarah Cottam
Stepdaughter - Ayesha Bharmal
Son - Jason Leavey
Little Boy - Finn Shannon
Little Girl - Imogen Byron

Madame Pace - Hannah Barnes

The "Company":

Producer - Tom Taggart
Leading Actress - Carmen Betteridge
Leading Actor - Jack Lancaster
Young Actress - Francesca Ciardi
Young Actor - Jerome Quiles
Stage Manager - Niki Simpson
Stage Hand - Tim Jaffier
Other Actor - Terry Pearce
Prompter - Fran Read

CREW

Directed by Andrea Giacobbe
Produced by Michael Hubbard
Stage Managed by Tammy Mitchell

Assistant Director: Jane Hammond
Assistant Producer: Melissa Ormiston
Assistant Stage Manager: Harriet Russell

Design and Artwork: Harriet Russell
Lighting: Jane Hammond, Alistair Macdonald
Sound: Alistair Macdonald

Props, Furniture and Costumes:
Harriet Russell, Mia Taylor, Tammy Mitchell

Make-up: Stefano Fabbi, Carolyn Davis

Set construction: members of the company


Front of House: Melissa Ormiston, Claire Simpson, Pete Picton, Clare MacDowall, Harriet Russell, Rachel Branton, Jacquetta Picton

With thanks to: Emily Byron, Denise Bailey, Jane Dickerson Shinn, David Gifford, Jack McGrane, Marie Darker, Phil Matcham, Pete Picton, Jacquetta Picton.

PRODUCTION NOTES

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Written in 1921 as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, Six Characters introduces Pirandello's device of the "theatre within the theatre".

It explores various levels of illusion and reality and the distortion of truth. It had a great impact on later writers, particularly such practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet, as well as Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Six characters appear on a stage that is being used for the rehearsal of a Pirandello play. They ask the Stage Manager for help. Created and then discarded by an author, they seek another author to cast them in a play and let them play out their roles.

A group of actors steps forward to portray the lives that the six characters have just described, but when they do so the characters object to their re-enactment, claiming that it distorts the truth.

When one of the characters commits suicide, the rest of the characters mourn his death while the actors insist nervously that it is only make believe. Which is it? And how will the situation be resolved?

* These performances are given by permission of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society on behalf of the Societa Italiana degli Autori ed Editori.