Questions & Answers
with Rupert Goold and Ben Power

What attracted you to this play?

Ben: Rupert and I were looking for a classic text which was a rare combination of being both theatrically exciting and intellectually ambitious. Six Characters is one of the most formally audacious plays ever written – a text so experimental it provoked riots when first premiered in Rome in 1921. It also has a reputation for being difficult and the fact that lots of its techniques have been appropriated by other mediums (particularly film) in the last eighty years meant that we thought there was room for us to re-imagine it slightly. In other words, we thought it could be re-contextualised and made to feel urgent and exciting for a modern audience.

How did you both come up with the concept for your version of Six Characters?

Rupert: We thought right from the beginning of our process that lots of the play’s questions about truth and the nature and trustworthiness of reality were questions that film and television were very engaged with at the moment. It seemed that it might be possible to move the play away from its original setting and focus it on a group of filmmakers without making it lose its power.

Ben: We suspected it could be made more powerful and accessible to a modern audience if it dealt with film rather than theatre. We then watched lots of different genres of film and television before settling on documentaries. We’d also been looking at the work of the Dignitas clinic (which offers assisted suicide) and the two came together quite naturally.

What were your influences (visual and literary) when writing and staging the play?

Rupert: Our main influence was definitely Pirandello himself. Not the dusty English version that had developed a reputation for being inaccessible, but the passionate, intellectually dazzling showman who audiences either loved or hated in 1920s Italy. We read lots of his other writing, particularly his later essays about Six Characters. We also watched lots of the films by people like Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman (particularly Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) and also the documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. Our designer, Miriam, is German and lots of our visual aesthetic is influenced by European photography, both German and Scandinavian. Finally, and obviously, Hamlet is a major influence on both the original play and our adaptation.

The 4th act departs significantly from the original version. What were you exploring with the series of ‘hijacks’ and how does it enhance a contemporary audience’s understanding of the original play?

Ben: The original play very clearly ends with a challenge to what we mean by ‘real’ and by ‘reality’. We wanted to develop this moment in order to really highlight the horror of what Pirandello is proposing – that reality doesn’t, can’t, really exist. We’re so used to seeing the idea of truth destroyed or challenged on screen. We thought it’d be both interesting and unsettling (and hopefully, kind of fun) to see it challenged on stage. Once we’d begun to rip up the fabric of truth in the play, following Pirandello’s own logic, we felt we had to continue to follow the journey of our film-maker, to keep ‘hi-jacking’ or undermining reality until we reached the only place we could, the only possible conclusion.

About the Play
‘All my work has always been… a challenge to the opinions of the public.’
(Luigi Pirandello in a letter to Virgilio Talli, 1917)

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a classic of modernism, a fundamentally subversive moment in the history of modern theatre. Its self-conscious setting – an open stage prepared for rehearsal – its fragmented narrative, confusing time levels and radical ideas caused an uproar at its first night on 9th May 1921 in the Teatro Valle in Rome: supporters of the playwright and their opponents came to blows – at the end Pirandello and his daughter had to leave hastily by the stage door.

This first version of the play, set entirely behind the proscenium arch, shows an Italian theatrical company rather reluctantly and inadequately at work on another play by Pirandello, The Rules of the Game. The script maps out the beginnings of the rehearsal. The Prompter reads out the stage directions, the Director decides on a few details concerning the set, an Actor queries his costume and the Director complains that they have to stage Pirandello because there are no more new good French plays. Just as the Director is dealing with yet another interruption, the theatre Usher creeps round the stage, doffs his cap and tells him that there are some people asking to speak with him. At the back of the stage stand six people, two of them children, bathed in a strange faint light, which seems to irradiate from them. The older man in the group explains that they are looking for an author. They claim they are characters who have been rejected by their author at different stages of development and are seeking life in a play. Told in fragments of rushed narrative, interspersed with the man’s ideas on the problems of communication, identity and art (similar to those of the author who had abandoned him), the story reveals an unhappy and dysfunctional family. The director is flattered into attempting to stage their narrative. The play proper begins – with some unforeseen and arresting consequences.

Six Characters in Search of an Author transformed its creator from a well reputed national man of letters into an international figure. By 1921 he had published poetry, essays, short stories, novels and plays in both his native Sicilian (he was born and spent his childhood in and around Agrigento) and Italian. It was after the clamorous reception of Six Characters (which was quickly followed by Henry IV) that Pirandello received his first invitation overseas, to Paris and New York in the first instance, and subsequently much further afield. In the 1920s in Paris and Berlin, Pirandello became a household name among the intelligentsia. Writing from Paris on the occasion of the first French production, Pirandello wrote excitedly to his daughter, Lietta. ‘I’ve truly arrived at the peak of my literary career!’.

Pirandello had a special regard for Six Characters in Search of an Author. He directed it himself in the revised version in 1925 at the theatre he established in Rome, the Teatro d’Arte, and he went with his company to various theatrical international centres where the revised version was performed to great acclaim. In this version, the Stepdaughter was then played by Marta Abba, the company’s leading actress who was to be the inspiration for a number of his later plays. Pirandello continued to follow the fortunes of the play with tenacity and from 1926 was developing ideas about a filmic version. Two years earlier, in discussion about the proposed film by Marcel L’Herbier of his novel The Late Matthias Pascal, Pirandello had said that film was the form of artistic expression that can ‘best give us the vision of thought’ and that ‘this young art’ could render dream, hallucination, madness and the doubling of personality better than either theatre or the novel. He had begun writing Six Characters as a novel – there remains a letter to his son Stefano in July, 1917 referring to ‘a strange piece, so very sad, Six Characters in Search of an Author: a novel in the making’ and a fragment of this early narrative – then decided that it would work better as a play. From the mid 1920s until his death in 1936 he worked on the possibilities of making it into a film. Film would allow him to explore better, he thought, an aspect not fully realised on stage: the process of creation, ‘how the six characters and their destinies were conceived in the author’s mind and, imbued with life, made themselves independent of him’. But no film resulted from these endeavours.

When Six Characters in Search of an Author was presented in Italy, the Italian language had no word for ‘director’. Italian theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century was largely an actor’s theatre, and the companies were run by actor managers. Pirandello wanted to transform it into an author’s theatre. But in the rest of Europe, in Germany and France in particular, theatre was dominated by its directors. It was the director who was seen as the major creator of theatrical performance. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Weimar Republic became the major centre for theatrical exploration and innovation. In the field of theatre, the economic boom led to new theatrical buildings, and the success of the two electrical companies, Siemens and AEG, had fundamental repercussions on theatre lighting. Powerful three-kilowatt bulbs and dimming mechanisms combined with the use of the white cyclorama made it possible to create both naturalistic and symbolic scenes undreamed of a few years earlier. So the European success of Six Characters in Search of an Author owes much to its early directors, who helped shape the revised 1925 text.

The first production outside Italy, Theodore Komisarjevsky’s greenroom production for the Stage Society in London in February 1922, so impressed George Bernard Shaw that he was instrumental in helping the American producer, Brock Pemberton, to mount the play in New York (October 1922). Pemberton’s production was the first to use the auditorium as part of the acting space, making the Leading Lady’s and the Director’s first entrance through the audience. Georges Pitoëff’s Parisian production in 1923 is credited as being a major force in the development of modern French theatre. Georges Neveux, the French dramatist and poet, claimed that without Pirandello and the Pitoëffs (Georges Pitoëff both directed and played the Father and his wife, Ludmilla, played the Stepdaughter) there would have been no modern French theatre. It was the entrance of the Characters that so impressed audiences of Pitoëff’s production – he brought the Characters on stage by means of the theatre lift. Reinhardt presented them as dreamlike figures haunting the Director and created of the opening improvised scene of the rehearsal scene an arresting display of the technical possibilities of his theatre. The 1925 revised version of the play incorporated a number of these directors’ insights. Later directors have found different ways of presenting Pirandello’s ideas, some making radical changes to the text. In his Moscow production of 1986 (a version of which was presented in London at the Brixton Academy in 1989), Anatoli Vasiliev, the ‘enfant terrible’ of late Soviet Russia, gave literal expression to the idea of multiple personality, an idea that the Father explains in Pirandello’s text – there was more than one Father, Stepdaughter and Director in his production. And the shock that 1921 theatre goers experienced in confronting an open curtain and a stage obviously set for a rehearsal was given a more arresting presentation: confusion began with wondering where to sit!

Each age (and director) finds a means to convey the essential challenges inherent in the text. Like Beckett in Waiting for Godot some thirty odd years later, Pirandello demanded that theatre confronted its inner contradictions. In Six Characters in Search of an Author Pirandello challenges theatre to present reality, but theatre fails to meet the challenge. The failure is on a number of levels: for instance, stage and social conventions do not allow the encounter between the Father and the Stepdaughter to be presented in its fullness, and particular theatre companies may not have the means at their disposal to present an accurate version of the settings. But the core of the problem is that theatre cannot represent reality: the actor playing the Father will never ‘be’ the Father. Indeed, in an earlier essay, ‘Illustrators, Actors and Translators’, parts of which are echoed in the play, Pirandello goes as far as to see the actor as an intrusion between the author and his creation. An actor gives material reality to a character but in so doing makes the character less true.

A fundamental aspect of attempting to present reality on stage concerns time. Dramatists have all wrestled with time - on a very basic level the dramatist must provide enough of the past to make the present action comprehensible and meaningful. European theatregoers had already been made aware of the way the past meets the present in Ibsen’s immaculately plotted plays. Pirandello, however, takes this double movement of time, the unravelling of the past as current times moves inexorably forward towards its explosive meeting with the past, into uncharted territory. His central figures are timeless beings, who nevertheless have a chronological story within their own dimension, a past that is continually present. How to stage different time levels was, and still is, one of the major challenges of the play and that challenge is probably Pirandello’s most lasting gift to theatre.

There are writers and directors who push at the frontiers of theatre from outside commercial circuit, who conduct experimental theatre workshops with little regard for performance. This was not Pirandello’s way. His challenge to theatre was not even made in an avant-garde setting or small fringe theatre as was Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, first performed as at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. Six Characters in Search of an Author was first staged in the elegant Teatro Valle, a leading theatre in Rome dating back to 1726 which had hosted all the major companies from the mid 19th century. He took on the establishment. His challenge was as much to the audience, as it was to theatre practitioners.

However, because he was writing in the early twentieth century, his brand of experimental fragmentation combined with a potentially highly emotive melodramatic story. For those of who like a gut-wrenching emotional experience in the theatre, that is there too – in the fragmented story of a family torn apart by the problems of communication, sex and death.

Jennifer Lurch

Cast Biographies:

Sarah Belcher
Actress/House Keeper

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (UK tour).
Theatre includes: The Weather Man (Opera North); The Elephant Man (Sheffield Lyceum); The Swing Left, Zero Degrees and Drifting (Unlimited Theatre); The Last Lot (Talking Birds); Roam, The Devil’s Larder (Grid Iron/NTS); The Magic Carpet (Lyric Hammersmith); He Stumbled, 13 Objects (The Wrestling School); No It Was You (Arcola Theatre); Chaste Maid In Cheap side (Almeida Theatre); Edmond, The Collection (Northern Stage); Ghost Ward (Almeida Theatre); The Ecstatic Bible (Adelaide Festival); The Nativity (Young Vic); Stranded (Young Vic/UK tour); Ursula (The Wrestling School/Birmingham Rep/UK tour); Candide, Ballad of Wolves, Leone and Lena (Gate Theatre); A River Sutra (National Theatre Studio); Red Ladies, The Metamorphoses, Silver Swan (Clod Ensemble/BAC); Sunspots (Red Room/National Theatre Studio).
Television includes: Talk to Me.
Film includes: Glitch; Beginners Luck.
Radio includes: Nyctalope; Knowledge and a Girl.

Jamie Bower
Actor/Pirandello

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gilgi).
Theatre includes: The Elephant Man (Sheffield Theatres/UK tour); Romeo and Juliet (Sprite Productions); Day of the Trifid (New Woolsey); The Picture of Dorian Gray (Big Telly Theatre); Black Comedy (Colorado Festival of Theatre); My Favourite Murder (Union Theatre); The Madness of George Dubai (West End).
Television includes: The Bill; The Secret Of Eel Island.
Radio includes: The Man on the Pillar.
Writing includes: My Favourite Murder (Union Theatre).
Directing includes: Breaking Strain (Edinburgh Festival/tour).

Eleanor David
Mother

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gilgi).
Theatre includes: The Lightening Play (Almeida Theatre); Three Women and a Piano Tuner (Hampstead Theatre/Chichester); Arcadia (Chichester); Duchess of Malfi (National Theatre); Nine (Don mar Warehouse); The Way of The World (Lyric); The Philanderer, Four Door Saloon (Hampstead Theatre); Keen (Old Vic); The Crucible (Royal Exchange, Manchester); A Streetcar Named Desire (Bristol Old Vic); The Brave (Bush Theatre); Les Liaisons Dangereuses (RSC); Birthright (Royal Court Theatre); When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (Bush Theatre); Victory (Royal Court); Summer (National Theatre); Cabaret (Belgrade Theatre).
Film includes: The Wall; The Rocking Horse Winner; Sylvia; Comfort and Joy; Slipstream; Potain du Rio; London Kills Me; 84 Charing Cross Road; Ladder of Swords; The Birthday Party; Topsy Turfy; The Biographer; House of Boys.
Television includes: The Bogies; The Member for Chelsea; Facelift; The Antonia White Quartet; Paradise Postponed; Shroud for a Nightingale; The Golden Hello; The Spirit of Man; The Guilty; The Rotters Club; The Silk Stocking.

Denise Gough
Stepdaughter

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gilgi).
Theatre includes: The Birds (Gate Theatre, Dublin); The Grouch (West Yorkshire Playhouse); Someone Else’s Shoes (Soho Theatre); Everything is Illuminated (Hampstead Theatre); Oh Go My Man (Royal Court); Flanders Mare (Sound Theatre); As You Like It, By The Bog of Cats (Wyndham’s Theatre); The Kindest of Strangers (Liverpool Everyman); Robbers, Theatre Train, Fear & Misery in the Third Reich (Tristan Bates).
Film includes: The Kid; Robin Hood; Lecture 21.
Television includes: The Bill; Tom Hernial; Waking the Dead; Silent Witness; Messiah V; Inspector Lynley Mysteries; Casualty; The Commander; Tell Me Lies.

Jake Harders
Cameraman/Theatre Maker

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud).
Theatre includes: Journey’s End (Background Productions); The Hypochondriac (Liverpool Playhouse/ETT); Hobson’s Choice (Nick Brooke Ltd/Chichester tour); Rope (Watermill Theatre); Cymbeline (Cheek by Jowl world tour); The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s Globe); Professor Bernhardi, Rose Bernd (Oxford Stage Company); Candida (Oxford Stage Company. Ian Charleson Award for Best Actor Under 30 in a Classical Drama – Commendation).
Television includes: Wannabes; Beethoven; Foyle’s War.
Radio includes: The Picture Man.
Jake trained at Grotowski Center Poland and Central School of Speech and Drama UK.

Ian McDiarmid
Father

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud).
Theatre includes: Be Near Me (Donmar Warehouse/National Theatre of Scotland); Jonah and Otto (Manchester Royal Exchange); John Gabriel Borkman, Henry IV (Donmar Warehouse); Faith Healer (Booth Theatre, New York. Tony Award.) The Embalmer, Faith Healer, The Tempest, The Jew of Malta, Doctor’s Dilemma, Ivanov, Tartuffe, The Government Inspector, The Cenci, School for Wives, Volpone, The Saxon Shore, Creditors (Almeida Theatre); Hated Nightfall, Insignificance (Olivier Award), The Love of a Good Man (Royal Court); The Black Prince (Aldwych Theatre); The Country Wife, Don Carlos, Edwards II (Manchester Royal Exchange); The Danton Affair, Downchild, The Castle, Crimes in Hot Countries, The War Plays, The Party, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, The Days of the Commune, Macbeth, That Good Between Us, Much Ado About Nothing, Schweik in the Second World War, Dingo, Destiny, Measure for Measure (RSC); Peer Gynt (Oxford Playhouse); Ezra, The Worlds (New Half Moon Theatre); Mephisto (Roundhouse); Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (Mermaid Theatre).
Film includes: Star Wars Episodes I, II, III, V & VI; Sleepy Hollow; Restoration; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; Gorky Park; The Awakening; Dragonslayer; Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End; Richard’s Things.
Television includes: Margaret; City of Vice; Our Hidden Lives; Spooks; Elizabeth I; Charles II; Crime and Punishment; All the King’s Men; Cold Lazarus; Karaoke; Pity in History; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman; Great Expectations; Touching Evil; Rebecca; Hillsborough; Annie: A Royal Adventure; Heart of Darkness; Chernobyl: The Final Warning; Selected Exits; The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles; Inspector Morse; The Nation’s Health; The Professionals; Last Night Another Dissident; Macbeth; Creditors.
As Director: Don Juan (Manchester Royal Exchange); The Possibilities, Scenes from an Execution, The Rehearsal, Lulu, A Hard Heart, Siren Song, Venice Preserved (Almeida Theatre). Ian McDiarmid was joint Artistic Director (with Jonathan Kent) of the Almeida Theatre from 1990 to 2002.

Freya Parker
Girl

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud).
Theatre includes: The Almond Tree (Liverpool Everyman); Apples (Northern Stage); Devils Gulch (BAC); Seep (Hampstead Theatre); Murder/Party Poppers, Dissection (TV Baby); Woyzeck; Plasticine (Unity, Liverpool).
Film includes: Insight; Enemy Lines; Theory of Mind; Act of God; Everyday Lives.
Television includes: Maze of Terror; Mythopolis; Blue Murder.

Robin Pearce
Editor

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud).
Theatre includes: Bedroom Farce (West Yorkshire Playhouse); Present Laughter (Theatre Royal Bath); Othello (Cheek By Jowl/world tour); The Cherry Orchard (Sheffield Crucible); Doctor Faustus (Bristol Old Vic); The White Devil (Lyric Theatre).
Film includes: Charlotte Gray.
Television includes: Survivors; Vexed; He Kills Coppers; Driving Me Mad; Broken News; The Project; Perfect World; Attachments; Casualty; The Bill.

Jeremy Joyce
Son

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK tour).
Theatre includes: Company Project, New Writing Playlist (Arcola); Rope (Watermill Theatre); Spring Awakening (Theatre Royal Bath/Union Theatre); Richard II (Old Vic/German Festival); Richard II (Berkoff/Ludlow Festival/tour); Much Ado About Nothing (Sheffield Crucible); Arcadia (Bristol Old Vic/Birmingham Rep); Over Gardens Out (Young Vic Workshop/Southwark Playhouse); Bugsy Malone (Queen’s).
Television includes: Waking The Dead; Holby City; Doctors (BBC).
Film includes: Headphones (dir. Tom Shkolnik). Jeremy trained at Drama Centre.

Martin Ledwith
The Exec/Mr Pace

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (UK tour).
Theatre includes: The Cut (Traverse); The Future is Betamax, The Call (Royal Court/Ambassadors Theatre); Terms of Abuse, Experiment With An Air Pump (Hampstead Theatre); Villette (Sheffield Crucible); Far From The Madding Crowd (Watermill/UK tour); The Old Lady Shows Her Medals (Southwark Playhouse); Queen’s English (Watford Palace); Phaedra, Macbeth (Edinburgh Lyceum).
Television includes: The Crow Road; The Whistleblower; Holby City; Doctors; Taggart; First Cuts; Superbugs; Heartbeat; Dream Team.
Film includes: Ghostdancer; Lee Is A Logo; The Delivery; Pretty Chickens.
As Director: If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank; The Dissolution of Dominic Boot; Pretty Chickens (Short Film).
Martin trained at RADA.

Catherine McCormack
Producer

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (UK tour).
Theatre includes: A Doll’s House Portrait of a Lady (Theatre Royal Bath); The Lady From Dubuque (Theatre Royal Haymarket); The 39 Steps (Tricycle Theatre); Vermillion Dreams (Salisbury Playhouse); Anna Weiss (Whitehall Theatre); All My Sons, White Horses, Free, Dinner, Honour (National Theatre); Kiss Me Like You Mean It (Soho Theatre); Lie Of The Mind (Donmar Warehouse); When The Night Begins (Hampstead Theatre); Under The Curse (Gate Theatre).
Television includes: Elizabeth David; In Praise of Hardcore; Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, Armadillo; Deacon Brodie; How to do Love in the 21st Century – Frenzy; Wycliffe.
Film includes: The Moon and the Stars; A Sound of Thunder; Spy Game; Tailor of Panama; Born Romantic; This Year’s Love; The Weight of Water; A Rumour of Angels; Shadow of the Vampire; The Debtors; Dancing at Lughnasa; Land Girls; The Honest Courtesan; Braveheart; Loaded.
As Director: Two short films written by William Boyd, Running to Stand Still and Wounded.

Creative Team Biographies:

Rupert Goold
Director/Adaptor

Rupert is Artistic Director of Headlong Theatre and an Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
For Headlong: ENRON (Chichester/Royal Court/West End); Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK tour); The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Almeida Theatre); Rough Crossings (Lyric Hammersmith/UK tour); Faustus (Hampstead Theatre/UK tour); Restoration (UK tour); Paradise Lost (UK tour).
Theatre includes: Time and the Conways (National Theatre); Oliver! (Theatre Royal Drury Lane); No Man’s Land (Gate Theatre Dublin/West End); Macbeth (Chichester/West End/Broadway – winner of Best Director, Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and Olivier awards); The Glass Menagerie (Apollo); Speaking Like Magpies, The Tempest (RSC); Scaramouche Jones (Dublin/world tour); Sunday Father, Gone to L.A. (Hampstead Theatre); The Colonel Bird (Gate, London); Wind in the Willows (Birmingham Rep); Broken Glass (Watford); Privates on Parade (New Vic).
Opera includes: Turandot (English National Opera); Le Comte Ory (Garsington Opera); L’Opera Seria, Gli Equivoci, Il Pomo D’Oro (Batignano).
From 2002-05 Rupert was Artistic Director of the Royal and Derngate Theatres in Northampton where productions included Hamlet, Othello, Waiting for Godot, Insignificance, The Weir, Betrayal, Arcadia and Summer Lightning. He was Associate Artist at Salisbury Playhouse from 1996–97 during its reopening under Jonathan Church where he directed The End of the Affair, Dancing at Lughnasa and the national tour of Travels With My Aunt. Rupert was a Trainee Director under Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse 1995–96.

Ben Power
Adaptor

Ben is the Associate Director of Headlong Theatre.
For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK tour); Faustus (Hampstead Theatre/UK tour); Paradise Lost (UK tour).
Ben has worked as dramaturg on all Headlong productions and has commissioned and developed a range of work from major playwrights including Lucy Prebble (ENRON), Richard Bean (The English Game) and Caryl Phillips (Rough Crossings).
Theatre includes: A Tender Thing (RSC); The Things She Sees (National Theatre); Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (Bristol Old Vic/UK tour); Cinderella (Lyric Hammersmith/Warwick Arts Centre); A Disappearing Number (Barbican/world tour – winner of Best Play, Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle awards); The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing (RSC); Tamburlaine the Great (Bankside Rose).
Radio includes: A Disappearing Number.
Forthcoming work includes major new commissions for the National Theatre, the RSC and Sadlers Wells.

Anna Ledwich
Associate Director

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK tour).
Theatre includes: A Christmas Carol (Chichester); Lovely and Misfit (Trafalgar Studios); GBS (Theatre 503); Roulette (Finborough Theatre); Horrific Acts for Charity (Roxy Bar and Screen); Poet No7 (Theatre 503/Dublin Fringe Festival); Yellowing (Harrow Arts Centre/Theatre 503/Jermyn Street Theatre).
As Assistant Director: The Grapes of Wrath (Chichester/UK tour); The Last Cigarette (Chichester/West End); The Cherry Orchard (Chichester); In the Club (Hampstead Theatre); The Good Person of Szechuan (Young Vic); Brussels Manifesto (Espace Scarabeus, Brussels).
As Casting Associate: Blackbird (UK tour).
Anna studied acting at Rose Bruford College and Creative Arts at University of Melbourne. She was a finalist in The Jerwood Director’s Award and was short listed for the James Menzies-Kitchen Award. Anna was a trainee director at Chichester Festival Theatre. She is a member of the Young Vic/Genesis Directors Project and was Associate Director of Theatre 503.

Miriam Buether
Designer

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK Tour).
Theatre/Dance/Opera includes: Judgement Day, When The Rain Stops Falling (Almeida Theatre); Turandot (English National Opera); Everybody Loves a Winner (Manchester International Festival); The Good Soul of Szechuan, In the Red and Brown Water, Generations, Red Demon (Young Vic); Cock, Relocated, My Child, Way to Heaven (Royal Court); The Bacchae, The Wonderful World of Dissocia, Realism (National Theatre of Scotland/Edinburgh International Festival); Sacrifice (Welsh National Opera, costumes only); Long Time Dead (Theatre Royal Plymouth); Trade (RSC/Soho Theatre); pool (no water) (Frantic Assembly); Unprotected (Liverpool Everyman); The Bee (Soho Theatre/Tokyo); The Death of Kinghoffer (Edinburgh International Festival/Scottish Opera); After the End (Traverse Theatre); Platform (ICA); Outsight, Tender Hooks (Foundation Gulbenkian, Lisbon); Guantanamo (Tricycle Theatre/West End/New York); Body of Poetry (Komische Oper, Berlin), Hartstocht (Introdans, The Netherlands); Track (Scottish Dance Theatre); Bintou (Arcola Theatre); Possibly Six, Tenderhooks (Canadian National Ballet); 7DS (Sadlers Wells).
Miriam won the 1999 Linbury Prize for Stage Design, the 2004/5 Critics Award for The Wonderful World of Dissocia and the 2008 Hospital Club Creative Award for Theatre. She was nominated for the 2007 TMA Award for Long Time Dead, the 2008 Evening Standard Award for In the Red and Brown Water, and the 2009 Evening Standard Award for Judgement Day.

Adam Cork
Composer & Sound Designer

For Headlong: ENRON (Chichester/Royal Court/West End); Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/ UK tour); The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Almeida Theatre); Faustus (Hampstead Theatre/UK tour); Paradise Lost (UK tour); Restoration (UK tour).
Theatre includes: Hamlet (Donmar Warehouse/Broadway); Ivanov (Donmar/Wyndham’s Theatre); All’s Well That Ends Well, Phèdre, Time and the Conways (National Theatre); No Man’s Land, A View from the Bridge (Duke of York’s); A Streetcar Named Desire, The Chalk Garden, Red, Othello, Creditors, The Wild Duck, The Cut, Don Juan in Soho, John Gabriel Borkmann, Caligula, Henry IV (Donmar Warehouse); Don Carlos (Gielgud); The Glass Menagerie (Apollo); On the Third Day (New Ambassadors); Speaking Like Magpies (RSC); The Tempest (RSC/Michigan/ Novello); Five Gold Rings, The Late Henry Moss, Tom and Viv (Almeida Theatre); Underneath the Lintel (Duchess); On the Ceiling (Garrick); Scaramouche Jones (Riverside Studios/world tour); Troilus and Cressida (Old Vic); Nine Parts of Desire (Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear (Sheffield Crucible); Romeo and Juliet (Manchester Royal Exchange); My Uncle Arly (Royal Opera House, Linbury); The Field, The War Next Door (Tricycle Theatre); Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Bristol Old Vic).
In 2008 for Macbeth (Broadway/Chichester/Gielgud), Adam was nominated for the Tony Award Best Sound Design for a Play. Other award nominations include 2007 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for a Play for Frost/Nixon (Broadway/Donmar/ US tour); and the 2005 Olivier Award Best Sound Design for Suddenly Last Summer (Albery).
Film includes: Sexdrive; Tripletake.
Television includes: France Tuesday; Bust; Re-ignited; Imprints; Radio: Losing Rosalind; The Luneberg Variation; The Colonel-Bird; Don Carlos; Othello; On the Ceiling. Adam read music at Cambridge University, studying composition with Robin Holloway.

Malcolm Rippeth
Lighting Designer

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK tour); Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness (UK tour); Faustus (Hampstead/UK tour).
Theatre includes: Brief Encounter (Kneehigh/West End/UK tour/US tour); Calendar Girls (West End/UK tour/Australian tour); Jack and the Beanstalk (Lyric Hammersmith); His Dark Materials (Birmingham Rep/UK tour); Cymbeline, Nights at the Circus, Don John, The Bacchae, Pandora’s Box (Kneehigh Theatre); The Winslow Boy (UK tour); The Gymnast (Edinburgh Festival); Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Copenhagen (Edinburgh Royal Lyceum); The Bloody Chamber, The Little Prince (Northern Stage); The Grouch, Scuffer, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Homage to Catalonia (West Yorkshire Playhouse); Mother Courage, Hamlet (ETT); Tutti Frutti (National Theatre of Scotland).
Opera/Musical/Dance work includes: Carmen Jones (Royal Festival Hall); Seven Deadly Sins (Welsh National Opera/ Diversions Dance); The Philosophers’ Stone (Garsington Opera); La Nuit Intime, Designer Body, Crush (balletLORENT). Malcolm won the 2009 Whatsonstage Theatregoers’ Choice Award for Best Lighting Designer for his work on Six Characters in Search of an Author and Brief Encounter.

Lorna Heavey
Video and Projection Designer

For Headlong: Six Characters in Search of an Author (Chichester/Gielgud/UK tour); The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (Almeida Theatre); King Lear (Young Vic); Rough Crossings (Lyric Hammersmith/UK tour); Faustus (Hampstead/UK tour); Paradise Lost (UK tour).
Theatre includes: Macbeth (Broadway/West End/Chichester. Olivier Award for Outstanding Video Design & Drama Desk Award nomination); Speaking In Tongues (West End); Madame de Sade (Donmar/West End); Aristo, I am Shakespeare (Chichester); Marianne Dreams, When the Rain Stops Falling (Almeida Theatre); The Tempest, Speaking Like Magpies (RSC/West End); The Caucasian Chalk Circle (National Theatre); Phaedra (Donmar Warehouse); Vanishing Point, Genoa 01 (Complicite/Royal Court); Ten Tiny Toes (Liverpool Everyman); Cooped (Purcell Rooms/world tour); Betrayal (Theatre Royal Northampton); Tall Phoenix (Belgrade Theatre).
Set/Costume/Video Design includes: Nocturne (Almeida Theatre); Branded (Old Vic); Hamlet Machine (KunstHalle Berlin/Battersea Arts Centre); Titus Andronicus, A Stitch in Time (Headfirst/Battersea Arts Centre); Beautiful Beginnings (Headfirst/Theatre 503); Cleansed (OSC).
Writing/Directing includes: A Stitch in Time; Beautiful Beginnings; Hamlet Machine; Murdered Sleep.
Opera includes: World premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Semper Dowland and The Corridor (Aldeburgh/QEH/Bregenz); Turandot (English National Opera); Jeanne d’Arc au bücher (Arcademia di Santa Cecilia); Norma (Grange Park); Dido and Aeneas (Opera North); Mahabharata (Sadler’s Wells).
Lorna Heavey is a multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker.
She trained in Fine Art at Düsseldorf Art Academy (class of Nam June Paik and Nan Hoover), and Chelsea. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Royal Institute of British Architects, Dada Dandies Berlin, and Budapest Academy. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in recognition of her contribution to the arts. She is founder and artistic director of Headfirst Foundation, a cross-platform, multi disciplinary artists collective.