HANNAH MOSCOVITCH
PRODIGAL PLAYWRIGHT
Q: Are you a café writer, a reclusive writer or something in between?
I have terrible writing habits. I write in bed. Sometimes I don’t get dressed, talk to anyone or leave the house for days. I used to write in cafés, but I’ve stopped because I would drink coffee after coffee and forget to eat.
Q: What was the first serious thing you remember writing, and was it any good?
I was a very serious little girl. I wrote melodramas and romances that had lots of adjectives in them. They weren’t good, but they were inadvertently funny.
Q:What’s something we don’t know about you but probably should?
I’m never sober at my premieres.
DIANA DONNELLY
THE HEROINE
Q: You have a Jeopardy question based on you (“Diana Donnelly found salvation—the Salvation Army that is—in the title role in this Shaw play in 2005.”) How regularly do you flaunt that fact to your castmates?
It’s pretty much all I talk about. And they love it.
Q: If you could be in any TV show…
Wow. OK, so aliens have landed and decreed that I must be cast in Mad Men. I play Norah Delaney, a small-town journalist who wears modest but fabulous dresses. I don’t find Don Draper attractive, and it makes him feel like he’s losing his mind. (But eventually we smooch. Obviously.)
PAUL DUNN
THE LOVER
Q: The wildest thing to happen during a performance is…
I was the Player Queen in Hamlet. I tripped on the gown’s train and fell on my butt, centre stage. I got up and composed myself, but my wig and crown were askew for the rest of the scene.
Q: Do you ever get recognized by theatre buffs in the street?
A young woman stopped me one day and listed three things I’d done this year. I can’t tell you how much that made my day!
BRENDAN GALL
THE HERO
Q: Tell us about the worst audition you’ve ever had.I was once asked to try playing Malvolio from Twelfth Night like a German praying mantis in geisha-girl makeup.
Q:What’s the challenge to playing Rudi?
Playing the son of an SS doctor while making direct eye contact with the audience and then trying to break the resulting tension with “humour.”
RICHARD ROSE
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Q: What’s the appeal of East of Berlin?
We hear about terrible Nazis, but never the children of Nazis. Or, we hear about terrible trauma, but never the children of trauma. This does that.
Q: What’s your favourite line from any play, ever?“The love is in the cooking and the washing,” from Howard Barker’s The Castle.
Q: Who has a better way with words: William Shakespeare or Conrad Black? Well, Shakespeare’s gone down in time. Black’s just serving time.