The Characters

Ferdy Roberts plays:

Greg/Malvolio, the deluded jumped up servant who is tricked by his fellow retainers into believing his mistress loves him. He is a man who believes life has other ideas for him.

Greg believes he doesn’t belong in a theatre collective any more. His relationship with Oscar is slowly and inexorably crumbling. He is the curmudgeon of the piece, thinking himself as too big and important and proper an actor still to be slumming it in alternative Shakespeare. Privately he would love to work for the Royal Shakespeare Company although publicly he slags them off as the ‘****ing RSC!’. He suffers delusions of grandeur and is the party pooper of the company.

Oliver Dimsdale plays:

Oscar/Sir Toby Belch, a drunkard; responsible with Sir Andrew Aguecheek for the general sense of chaos and misrule. He relies on his kinship for his continued existence and uses others to do his dirty work.

Oscar cannot escape from his drunken on-stage character; he is usually intoxicated during performances. He protests that he doesn’t believe in hierarchy, yet his public school/upper class background means that his default position is to play master to everyone else’s servant.

His wife Katie is adding to his pressure. She is a successful film actress, desperate to start a family. But she needs Oscar to start earning a living wage, urging him to take the TV soap job she has got him. But Oscar can’t imagine leaving his theatre company Sea in the Sieve.

Poppy Miller plays:

Penny/Viola, a twin washed up lost on the shores of Illyria, who is unsure of her position in this strange land and so disguises herself as a man. She is our heroine who falls in love with Orsino, but who is sent by him to woo Olivia, who promptly falls in love with her, adding to the confusion of her sexuality.

Penny has recently undergone a huge life change – she’s become an actress. She used to be in banking, but she chucked it all in to join the theatre company her husband, Greg, acts in, partly in one last attempt to save her marriage but mostly because she’d always fancied acting. She’s brilliant. So brilliant she gets all the reviews, much to the dismay of the career actors, (such as her understudy).

Sandy Foster plays:

Suzie/The Understudy who hates the fact that Penny has been parachuted in over her head. She is ambitious and desperate to get on stage. She resents the relationships that everyone else in the company seem to have had with each other. She is the outsider who is disrespected by Greg. She is determined to seek her revenge and she is aided and abetted by the other women in the cast.