Characters and Original Cast
| Name in play | Name in short story | Play description | Short story description | Originator of role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sergeant Klooque | Sergeant Brice | A soldier in the King's Hussars, just returned from Johannesburg | A soldier in Her Majesty Queen Anne's Foot Guards, just returned from Malplaquet. | W. M. Terrott |
| Boomblehardt | Verditter | A miser | A miser | Edward Righton |
| Martha | Dorothy Trabbs | Landlady of the Three Pigeons | Landlady of the Three Pigeons | Miss L. Harris |
| Peter | Peter | A young farmer | The landlady's nephew | Maggie Brennan |
| Pipette | Jenny | The landlady's niece | The landlady's daughter | Kate Bishop |
| Jacques | – | A villager | – | Charles Parry |
| A Strange Old Lady | A Strange Old Lady | A strange old lady | A strange old lady | Lucy Franklein |
As was common in Victorian drama, a woman (Maggie Brennan) played a young man (Peter). The play's script assigns dialogue to three numbered villagers in the opening scene. The named character of Jacques has no more lines than any of these and disappears after the first page of the script. Righton, who first played Boomblehardt, portrayed him as a Jewish caricature. Gilbert's script did not use a Jewish dialect, and historian Jane Stedman suggests that Righton's increasingly broad portrayal and interpolations show that Gilbert had little control of Righton's portrayal of the part.
Read more about this topic: Creatures Of Impulse
Famous quotes containing the words characters, original and/or cast:
“I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had been chaos. That he would be successful in an original way, or that he would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable. The only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in the circumstances amid which he was born.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)