Characters: Fogg, Passepartout and a Cast of Many

The Four Major Characters

Around the World in 80 Days has a small core company at its dramatic centre, surrounded by the dozens of minor characters produced by the eight-actor ensemble. Understanding each major character’s function — and the precise physical and vocal choices a performer might make — is essential for the extended-response questions you will encounter in the exam. Let’s take them in turn.

Phileas Fogg: the Still Centre

Fogg is one of the most unusual protagonists in the set-play list. Where most leads carry the play through visible emotional change — Proctor's moral disintegration, Mickey's rage-filled final scene — Fogg’s dramatic function is almost the opposite. His stillness is the comic engine. Every obstacle that throws Passepartout into comic crisis simply registers on Fogg as a minor inconvenience to be noted in his schedule. A performer playing Fogg should resist the temptation to play him as broadly comic. Instead, the performance choices are rooted in understatement: an upright posture, precise and unhurried movement, a measured vocal delivery with minimal variation in pitch — and then, in the moments that matter (the rescue of Aouda, the final London revelation), a tiny shift of vocal warmth or physical openness that carries enormous weight precisely because of the stillness that surrounds it.

From a design perspective, Fogg’s visual identity is equally precise. A costume designer might use a dark Victorian frock coat, waistcoat and pocket watch as the anchoring constant — the one costume that never changes throughout the journey while everything around him transforms. This contrast between Fogg’s fixed costume and the constantly shifting proxemics of the ensemble around him gives the audience a visual anchor in every new location.

Jean Passepartout: the Audience's Way In

If Fogg is the still centre, Passepartout is the kinetic perimeter. The French valet functions as the audience’s emotional guide through the journey: he worries when we worry, panics when the plan threatens to unravel, and celebrates when the adventure turns in their favour. A performer playing Passepartout has much greater physical and vocal range to work with than the performer playing Fogg. Blocking choices for Passepartout should be energetic and reactive — he might move frequently across the stage, use larger gestures, speak with more variation in pitch and pace, and respond visibly in his body to each new development. His relationship to the audience can include moments of direct comedy: a wide-eyed look to the audience when Fogg announces the next leg of the journey, a physical double-take, a sudden stillness of comic alarm.

Crucially, a strong answer understands that Passepartout and Fogg’s comedy is entirely dependent on their contrast. If a performer plays Fogg as energetic, the play loses its engine. If a performer plays Passepartout as restrained, the comic double-act collapses. The proxemics between them — Fogg typically upstage centre or slightly elevated, Passepartout closer to the audience at downstage centre — reinforces the status difference while keeping Passepartout as the audience’s primary point of identification.

Inspector Fix: the Pursuing Antagonist

Fix is a Scotland Yard detective who is convinced Fogg is the perpetrator of a bank robbery. He pursues the party from the Suez Canal onwards, attempting to delay Fogg at each stop so that a warrant can catch up with him. Fix creates dramatic irony: the audience knows Fogg is innocent, Fix does not, and this gap generates comedy as well as tension. A performer playing Fix must walk a line between genuine threat (he has the legal power to detain Fogg) and comic obsession (his certainty is transparently wrong, and increasingly desperate). Vocally, Fix might employ a slightly faster pace than Fogg — suggesting agitation beneath a professional exterior — and physical choices that place him in the gaps between the main party: always slightly upstage, slightly to one side, watching from upstage in a way that signals surveillance without interrupting the main action.

Aouda: from Rescued to Active

Aouda is the young Indian woman rescued by Fogg from a dangerous situation in India. Students often under-write her, treating her as a passive figure — rescued, grateful, silent. This is a significant misconception. While Verne’s original novel is a product of its time in its portrayal of Indian women, Eason’s adaptation (and the performance traditions that have grown around it) understand Aouda as someone whose arc moves from shock and vulnerability in her first scenes to active participation in the company as the journey continues. By the final London scenes she is part of the decision-making group, not simply an observer. A performer playing Aouda should track this arc physically: an initial containedness — quieter movement, closer proximity to Fogg as her protector — gradually opening into a more assured spatial presence, with more confident eye contact with both other characters and the audience, as her trust in the company grows.

The Multi-Roled Ensemble: Character Through Transformation

Beyond the four core characters, the eight-actor ensemble plays every other role in the play — the Reform Club wager-makers, the Suez customs official, the Bombay merchant, ship captains, train conductors, Native American warriors, Yokohama acrobats, and more. Each transformation requires the performer to signal a new character quickly and clearly. The technique is not naturalistic psychology — there is no time for a Stanislavskian interior journey into each minor character’s backstory. Instead, the physical-theatre vocabulary of the play demands clear gestus — a posture or gesture that instantly communicates the character’s social function and status. The Suez customs official stands with an officious squared-up posture, arms slightly out to signal authority; the Yokohama acrobat drops into a low centre of gravity with loose, ready limbs. These images are legible to the whole audience in an in-the-round configuration because they read from every angle.