Annie taps new talent

It is when you actually spot the two tiny girls who are to be playing Annie, sitting on the sofa chatting excitedly, their feet barely reaching the floor, that the scale of the task ahead – for them – really hits you.

On stage, the success of a production of the musical Annie, obviously, hinges on the performance of the young girl who is cast in the demanding title role. You know this and you know that unless the producers find a very young looking adult to play Annie, then a very young performer will be shouldering a large responsibility. But it is only when you meet two youngsters about to take on the task that you look and think – are those two little girls really going to be fronting a major theatrical production?

Yes they are. It will be the job of Phoebe Roberts, 11, from Liversedge, and Sophie Downham, a 12-year-old from Pudsey, to stand on the stage of the Quarry Theatre at West Yorkshire Playhouse and and hold the audience. On sell-out nights – and there are already several of those – it will mean performing to an audience of 750 full of expectation from the middle of an enormous stage. Sometimes on their own.

Did I mention these girls are 11 and 12 years old?

The pair will alternate in the role during the two month run of the show at the theatre in Leeds.

Either the enormity of the task hasn’t quite hit them, or these two are already, even at this tender age, consummate professionals because, as they chat excitedly on a sofa at a specially arranged photo shoot with the whole cast for the Yorkshire Post, they display no hint of nerves.

Indeed, I can’t really tell you what they said when I asked if they were apprehensive at the prospect of playing the lead in the Playhouse’s Christmas show, because they were essentially silently bemused at the idea. A look that passes between the pair of them seems to suggest that the idea of nerves is the sort of thing someone who was not in the profession might ask about.

Mind you, these precocious 11 and 12 year-olds are already seasoned performers.

Sophie has appeared in Les Miserables on a national tour and was also in the TV shows Unforgiven alongside Suranne Jones and Appropriate Adult, which starred Dominic West.

For Phoebe, this will be the second time she has played Annie – and she has appeared in a professional production of Dr Doolittle.

“It’s hard work but at the end of the day you want to make it a good performance for the audience,” is her poised response to a question. “You don’t do all those hours of rehearsal for no reason, you do it to make a great show and for people to get their money’s worth.

“You just want to go up there and be the best Annie you can be.”

Just to repeat, Pheobe is 11 years old.

For her part, Sophie is delighted to get the chance to act because she had been considering a life in ballet.

“I was thinking about that as a career, but you can only last doing that until you’re something like 20, then you have to stop. So I think acting is probably a better thing to do,” she says.

While the mature attitude and wise words are disarming, there are also flashes that reveal that Phoebe and Sophie, are still a pair of little girls.