Cast Down

Sometimes I've been told I'm good at casting - in terms of choosing the best performers for roles in plays and the like. It's nice to be told that, because it suggests that people are comfortable watching something I've been partly responsible for putting together. (Only ever partly: theatre is the great collaborative art.) But the problem is you can never be sure you did choose the best.

You see, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Choose someone with the capacity for a role and some degree of talent and they will make a role their own over weeks of rehearsal. They may well excel, and it's a joy when they do. But the truth is that Candidate B may have done even better. You will never know.

You can't presume you really were right. It would be silly to assume that somehow you got it wrong. Because you didn't.

So I agonise. And I agonise. And I agonise. And then I don't.