Giles Woodforde talks to director John Terry about Chipping Norton Theatre's season highlight - Stones In His Pockets

A big fat Hollywood film production, complete with star names and all the trimmings, invades a small town in County Kerry, Ireland. For some, the film means welcome work as extras – at €80 a day, plus all the food they can eat from the catering wagon. But for others, it means heartache, and in one case results in a local teenager committing suicide.

That’s the storyline of Marie Jones’s award-winning tragicomedy Stones in His Pockets. The play was designed to tour to small community halls, so the budget only ran to two actors – who play no less than 15 different characters, male and female, between them.

“I said to the actors on the first day of rehearsals: ‘This play should be impossible’, says director John Terry. “It’s a very technical piece to rehearse. You are constantly having to work out where each character is going, who are they talking to, what happens after we leave them, and so on. There are a lot of scenes where there are six, seven, or eight different characters on stage, but you’ve only got the two actors, both in one set of costumes. The trick we play on the audience is that after a while your eyes really do start to see more than two people on stage.”

We’re talking on stage at The Theatre, Chipping Norton, as John rehearses a brand new in-house production of Stones, which will criss-cross the country – it’s by far the largest touring operation The Theatre has mounted in its 40-year history.

“I think there’s a lot of real feeling and emotion in the story,” John continues. “The danger of this play is making it: ‘Let’s laugh at these people because they are different from us’. That’s funny for a brief period of time, then it gets rather tedious.

“There’s a sense of this disappearing world of the Irish countryside, and people working on the land. At the time the play was written in the mid-1990s, Ireland was a hugely popular movie location, and that’s now true once more: Game of Thrones has become an enormous industry. A lot of people are making their living out of presenting Ireland as a chocolate box product: County Kerry, in which the play is set, has become a huge tourist destination.”

Playing the 15 parts are Irish actors Conan Sweeny and Charlie de Bromhead. In one of the play’s most memorable scenes, manipulative American film star Caroline makes amorous advances on a gullible local - who devastatingly discovers that all she wants is help in improving her appalling Irish accent.

“I have the privilege and pleasure of playing the delightful and gorgeous Caroline, so naturally they had to give me that role!” Conan laughs. “We were thinking that things weren’t complicated enough for us actors already, so we’re proposing that Caroline should wear a full frock – only joking! If we really had to change costumes we could end up with five changes within a ten second period on several occasions. ”

But, I ask Conan, if Caroline has trouble with her Irish accent, how is he on speaking American?

“Luckily Caroline is the only American who speaks! Meanwhile, I think I’m playing five different Irish characters, three from approximately the same part of the country, and the others from completely different places. The main character I play, Charlie, is probably the closest to where I come from, accent-wise. But in my part of Ireland, if you go to the town four miles down the road, the accent will change quite considerably. But I think we’re doing OK. I play an English director, Clem, as well, so as we’re touring this show all round England, I’m expecting audiences to be particularly unforgiving of any accent lapses when I’m playing him.”

“If an accent is very close to your own, there is a danger that you slip back into it without being conscious of it,” adds Charlie. “Also I’m playing three characters from the same village: including one at three different stages of his life – aged 80, 17, and 12, so I might have to go a little squeaky with the youngest.”

Stones in His Pockets plays in Chipping Norton from 5-16 April, and at five other Oxfordshire venues during April and May, including the Oxford Pegasus and the Cornerstone, Didcot. Full details: chippingnortontheatre.com