Ilse

Ilse is the girl who has run off to lead a debauched life posing for painters, getting into murderous scrapes and generally running riot.

While all the other characters are hemmed in by the constraints of society, Ilse is the mad one who escapes to Bohemia. Originally I saw her as a bit of a nutter, loopy round the edges and corrupted (although she relishes it) by what she has seen. And this is how we took her for the first few rehearsals.

Then we had rather a shift.

As the only person in the play who has broken free and followed her dreams (for better or for worse), Ilse represents normality, or at least what normality should be. In this sense she is the most ordinary of the characters even if this means she now has extraordinary stories to tell.