The Silence That Follows - Marie Castel and Anna Clart Interview

Music, love, madness. Murder? Not murder. I mean, not really.
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How can you experience desire in a world where everything feels underwhelming? How can you explore your sexuality when everyone else’s conception of sex makes no sense to you?

In a decent but unimpressive orchestra, Harry and Ophelie feel stuck and disconnected. So when they realise that they can summon a mysterious male figure through music, they develop a strange bond. Rivalry, obsession and sensuality combine as they work to turn their fantasy into reality. 

Enter Giulia, another musician of… limited talent. Awful? No. But bad enough to drive their apparition away. She'd probably be fired—if only she weren't having an affair with the conductor… 

They’re not going to kill her. 

It’s not that type of story. 

It’s about doing little things, inconsequential really. Just enough to make her leave. It’s not their fault Giulia is more fragile than anticipated, is it?

Loosely inspired by Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, music becomes the set of a fantastical thriller where reality turns into a psychedelic nightmare.

After being long-listed for the 2025 Woven Voices Playwriting Prize, The Silence That Follows is making its debut with the Hope Theatre as part of the Write Club Festival.

Ahead of performances at The Hope Theatre, we spoke to writer and actor Marie Castel and director Anna Clart to learn more.

What can you both tell me about this piece?
Marie: A musically inspired fever dream? Take two very unhappy, frustrated musicians, give them the physical manifestation of what they desire most, add someone’s life to ruin because of it, shake a bit and see what happens!

Anna: It's dark, and funny, and very Marie. It's about two humans with gaping holes in their lives who form a twisted bond to try to fill them. There's obsession, haunting, violin cases filled with pills and four amazing actors I'm very grateful to be working with.

What inspired the creation of the show?
Marie: “An orchestra warming up”. It was a prompt from a writing exercise I was doing with Oliver Maynard (Harry in the play) – two recently graduated actors trying to get the creative juices going. Every week, we’d prompt each other to go write something then come back to read it.

I imagined obsessing about a musically summoned figure and thought “wait, that rings a bell…”. I remembered my father making me listen to Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique as a child, just like his own father had with him. He’d describe everything that was happening as the music was playing: “this is where he sees her”, “this is where he dreams he’s getting executed”, “this is where her ghost is dancing on his grave”.

I delved into that (and Berlioz’ actual life story, it’s mad!) and added my own questions about obsession, sexuality, creativity, while listening to the music I was exposed to by my parents: classical and classics from the 80s/90s. I wanted to move away from the boy meets girl and they fall in love trope. I find friendships are often forgotten in storytelling, in spite of being as important and potentially twisted as any other relationships. I loved the idea of writing a story about sensuality and sexuality with people who are not sensual or sexual with each other.

Clockwise: Marie Castel (Ophelie) and Oliver Maynard (Harry), Anita Brokmeier (Female Figures) and Rufus Hunt (Male Figures).

How did the connection between the two of you begin?
Anna: We met at drama school: I was doing a directing degree, Marie an acting one, but LAMDA's philosophy is 'If you're going to order actors around for a living, you'd better experience their job yourself for a bit'.

Marie: We shared the first term of classes: all of us rolling on the floor, doing character work, questioning which part of our bodies we lead with… it’s bound to make us close!

Anna: I then asked Marie to be in a devised piece – lots of torchlight, murder, one performer spitting blood I think. Our working styles meshed, she didn't think I was insane, we became friends and voilà.

Marie: We also both happen to be European creatives who decided to move to the UK to study and work. Anna from Germany (and Canada), me from France. Very different in terms of art but linked by that European way of working: do a lot with very little. We share a love a strong visuals and working with a lot of sounds and music. Working together is an added bonus of spending hours (and pounds!) in coffees and drinks.

In your exploration of these themes, how did you approach the character of Ophélie, Marie?
Marie: Harry and Ophélie are written as two sides of the same coin. While Harry is the witness of his own wasted potential, Ophélie is crushed by expectations she will never meet. They oppose and complete each other.

Because she is easily overwhelmed by her senses, Ophélie shuts everything down and makes solid mental rules for herself to apprehend life. She resents how people seem to be obsessed by sexuality (their own or anyone else’s) – “like it’s a conversation in disguise, pretending to be about something else, but that’s all you’re invested in”.

There’s definitely some neurodivergent coding happening (which, as a neurodivergent creative, is not a surprise). But, at the end of the day, for Ophélie, it’s not about a potential diagnosis. It’s about those rules – what they mean to her, when is it a story she’s trying to convince herself of to make sense of the world, when does she feel safe to explore things she doesn’t understand and, especially, with who.

Anna, how did you shape the overall vision of the play as a director?
Anna: It's a world conjured up, warped and manipulated by music. Berlioz's Symphonie is the pulse of the show, which means our staging has to be fluid and ready to shift with the beat of a note. It's also a story of obsession, and being haunted by your choices. So the fundamental question of most scenes is: how can we keep the figures that Harry and Ophélie are yearning for or avoiding, loving or hating, present for the audience? How can we show the effect they are having on the musicians, and the growing power they have over them, even in scenes where they don't technically appear?

Anna Clart.

What about the character Giulia? She seems to bring an interesting dynamic into the narrative. Marie, how do you see her role in this triangular relationship?
Marie: I love talking about Giulia! She is central to the play. She’s the main obstacle to overcome, the antagonist in a way. She just doesn’t know it.

Harry and Ophélie are in love with a fantasy. When writing the play, I felt we needed to have reality confront them and them choose the fantasy over and over again. When they decide to bully Giulia out of the orchestra, it’s the most natural thing in the world for them. It’s practical. They’re desperate people finally finding solace, how dares an incompetent musician threaten to ruin that? It’s unfair!
I see Giulia as the most human of them all. She’s the innocent bystander who gets the worst of it. She’s a tool to the conductor who regularly has affairs with musicians, she’s the target of desperate musicians lost in an obsession. I like to imagine that there are two plays: the fantastical thriller lived by Harry and Ophélie and the tragedy lived by Giulia.

What can audiences expect in terms of the emotional experience when they see The Silence That Follows?
Marie: Dream, confusion, longing, fear… enjoyment of nastiness? That’s the French in me: we culturally enjoy being mean. It’s the line between teasing and mocking, exposing and provoking. When we’re unhappy, it can feel like taking some kind of revenge on the world. It certainly does for Harry and Ophélie. I hope it does for the audience as well.

Anna: If they're laughing one moment, feeling queasy the next and come out thinking how beautiful but deeply weird Berlioz's music is, we'll have done our job.

What was the first piece of theatre you remember having a big impact on you?
Anna: I'd like to say Pina Bausch's Tanztheater (especially The Rite of Spring), but the honest answer is probably the plays we put on in primary school. I was about 8 and cast as a talking gust of wind, and that was it – I fell in love with theatre.

Marie: Angels in America, hands down. I had worked on a scene during my first year in Cours Florent in Paris, then saw a French adaptation at the Cartoucherie in… oh wow it was 2015 I think! Since then I’ve seen every version I could find anywhere. It has everything. I can’t put it into words, I just know it absolutely changed me.

What gives you inspiration?
Anna: Chats with friends. Time by the ocean. Watching other shows and thinking either 'God I wish I'd made that' or 'I disagree entirely and here's what I'd do instead'.

Marie: Anything that makes me escape – shows, reading, music, games... I get into tunnels of hyper-fixation and everything in the world becomes about that. It’s very addictive.

Otherwise, my family (like all families) has the most interesting characters I’ll ever meet. I could write or play aspects of them for anything. They’re the window that help me apprehend the world, in good and in bad.

What do you hope an audience member takes away from seeing the show?
Marie: Conflict. I love leaving a show feeling conflicted. I hope people feel they can relate to Harry and Ophélie and blame them for what they resort to, want them to succeed in finding their own twisted happiness and need them to be punished.

If anything, I hope they leave with good music in their heads for the rest of the evening!

Anna: I hope they have a little more courage to go explore what they really want from life. And to be honest and vulnerable with those they love (or could love).

The Silence That Follows play at the Hope Theatre on 23rd and 24th January 2026. Tickets are available from https://www.thehopetheatre.com/thesilencethatfollows