Sophie Gee

And I think that it's a really, really cleverly, really simple but beautifully thought through opening moment of the character thinking, this is a dream.

I'm sure I'm asleep.

Also a shout out to Hamlet, of course.

Jonty, that's such a brilliant smoking quill.

I don't even know if it's a smoking quill.

It's just an amazing secret story behind the story.

It's fantastic.

So Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, unbeknownst to you, is particularly dear to my heart because it's actually the first text I ever taught as a young academic.

I got my first teaching job.

at Macquarie University in Sydney, and I taught six characters in search of an author.

So it was like, it's cultural cringe on cultural cringe.

I mean, you know, what we're discovering here, Jonty, is that I am Nioh Marsh, just as I was Joan Lindsay.

And just to kind of tag onto your great point about Pirandello and his kind of meta-theatre,

It's very similar actually to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the Tom Stoppard play, which is also sort of playing with plucking characters out of the margins of a famous piece of theatre and kind of turning them into the kind of main event.

And of course, everything that you were just talking about, Jonty, with this blurry line between actors and

kind of authentic emotions, how difficult it is to tell the difference between what you're putting on and what is really within, difficult to the point where they actually become kind of indistinguishable.

These are the great themes of Hamlet, the play that has the play within a play and becomes the way to catch the conscience of a king by performing this scene.

So all of those things are in the background of vintage murder, but she's wearing them incredibly lightly, I think.

Sorry, just a quick shout out to another, just still a smoking quill.

I mean, you are...