Characters: Sephy, Callum and Their Families
Building Character in a Divided World
In Cooke’s adaptation, every character carries the weight of their social position — Cross or nought — in their body, their costume and their proxemics. Understanding character in this play means understanding that identity is not just personal but systemic: how a character moves through the world, who they stand close to, who they are permitted to touch, is regulated by a state hierarchy. This means that performance choices about posture, gesture and personal space are politically loaded in a way that would not be true of a purely domestic drama.
Sephy Hadley: Privilege and Its Costs
Sephy is a Cross teenager — daughter of Kamal Hadley, a senior Cross politician a senior Cross politician (a Home Office minister in the RSC version). She begins the play idealistic and naive, genuinely unable to see how the privileges of her class have shaped her. A performer playing Sephy in the opening scenes might physicalize this through an open, unselfconscious posture — taking up space freely, moving without caution through the shared world of childhood. As the play progresses and Sephy begins to understand what the system requires of her, a director might ask the performer to pull this openness back: a gradual closing of the body, a wariness in the gaze, a loss of the easy movement she once had.
Sephy’s journey is one of radicalisation in reverse: she starts privileged and ends broken. For a lighting designer, this arc offers a clear visual opportunity. In the early scenes, Sephy might be lit with a warm overhead wash, the colour of sunlight, suggesting her unexamined confidence. By the play’s final sequences, a shift to a cooler, more isolating lighting state — perhaps a single profile lantern from a steep angle — could signal how utterly her world has contracted.
Sephy Hadley is a Cross teenager whose arc moves from naive idealism to hardened experience. Her father Kamal is a senior Cross politician; her mother Jasmine is outwardly respectable but privately alcoholic. Sephy’s privilege is the play’s central irony: she cannot see what it costs others until it is too late.
Callum McGregor: Denied and Radicalised
Callum is a nought teenager — bright, academically able, yet denied access to the “good” Cross schools until one limited integration scheme briefly opens a door. His character carries the play’s most immediate political charge: he is the proof that noughts are not inferior, simply excluded. A performer playing Callum must navigate the tension between Callum’s private warmth (especially in the scenes with Sephy) and his public caution — the learned habit of making himself smaller in Cross spaces.
This physical self-policing is one of the play’s most powerful performance opportunities. In Cross spaces — the school, formal settings — a director might ask the performer playing Callum to reduce physical expressiveness: keep the arms closer to the body, reduce gesture, avoid direct eye contact with Cross characters. When Callum is alone with Sephy, or in nought spaces, this tension can release, and the performer can find the fuller, freer physicality of someone no longer performing safety. This contrast in itself communicates the structural violence of the play’s world.
The first day at the Cross school is one of the play’s key staging moments. As a performer playing Callum arriving at the school, you might begin your entrance upstage, walking towards the audience through a gauntlet of staring Cross students placed at stage left and stage right. Your pace might slow progressively — each step taken with deliberate care, a pause before crossing any threshold. Your vocal delivery in any lines spoken here could be clipped, quieter than usual, a small register suggesting the suppression of the fuller self. The blocking of this arrival — Callum isolated at centre stage while the ensemble closes in from the sides — would communicate the surveillance of the Cross institution without a single line of dialogue needing to explain it.
The Mothers: Jasmine and Meggie
Jasmine Hadley and Meggie McGregor are mirror characters: both mothers, both women shaped by the system, both trying to protect their children. But the system has shaped them in opposite directions. Jasmine is outwardly poised — a Cross woman in a comfortable home — but privately alcoholic, her composure a performance that costs her enormously. A costume designer might give Jasmine immaculate fitted clothing in neutral tones or cream, signifying the Cross ideal of restrained elegance, while using subtle visual cues — a slightly misaligned accessory, a drink glass always within reach — to suggest the cracks beneath.
Meggie McGregor, once Jasmine’s nanny and now a nought woman struggling after her husband Ryan’s arrest, carries exhaustion as a costume and physical signature. A designer working on Meggie’s costume might choose worn, darker fabrics — colours that have faded with washing — and a silhouette that is practical rather than decorative, communicating a life spent in service and in survival. Where Jasmine’s costume silhouette speaks of leisure, Meggie’s speaks of labour.
Jasmine Hadley and Meggie McGregor are structural mirrors: both mothers, both shaped by the racial hierarchy in opposite ways. Ryan McGregor (Callum’s father) is a nought activist arrested by the state; his absence is as significant as his presence in shaping Callum’s trajectory towards the Liberation Militia.
Supporting Characters: Jude, Lynette and the State
Jude McGregor (Callum’s brother) is radicalised by the death of his sister Lynette and becomes a Liberation Militia operative. Where Callum is drawn in reluctantly, Jude chooses violence as a response to grief. In performance terms, Jude offers a contrast to Callum: where Callum pulls inward in Cross spaces, Jude pushes outward — a reckless, outward-projected physicality that signals his abandonment of self-preservation. Lynette, mentally ill after a racist attack, is a character whose presence serves as an early signal of the violence the system is capable of, before it turns on the McGregor family directly.
State officials — interrogators, prison officers — are typically multi-roled in productions of this play. This is both a practical casting economy and a political statement: the system’s agents are interchangeable, institutional rather than individual. A director using multi-roling for the state officials might ask performers to adopt a shared gestus — a particular physical bearing, a precise angle of authority — that marks out their function regardless of which character they are currently playing.
A very common exam error is to answer costume design questions in Noughts and Crosses with ‘Crosses would wear black and noughts would wear white.’ This is too simple and misses the play’s complexity. The play does not work with a straightforward black/white binary in costume — it works with coded markers of class, formality, status and access. A more sophisticated design answer would specify: the fabric (fine wool or silk for Cross characters versus cotton or synthetic blends for noughts), the fit (tailored versus off-the-peg), the colour palette (privileged neutrals and jewel tones for Crosses, muted desaturated colours for noughts), and the condition of the clothing (new and pressed versus worn and faded). Explain what each choice communicates about the hierarchy, not just that there is a hierarchy.