From Tudor queen to shell-shocked soldier, Regency heroine to Hollywood icon, Dyad Theatre's Rebecca Vaughan portrays a dazzlingly diverse array of characters in her touring solo shows. 

A small team comprising just six people and usually only one performer, Dyad focuses on ‘radical’ approaches to familiar stories - radical, according to Vaughan, in its original sense of returning to roots. By using only words directly lifted from either fictional texts or the writings of real, historical figures, the company aims to paint honest, intimate pictures of the real and invented characters it takes as its subjects. 
“We try not to invent or deny anything, but within that you've got worlds that you can play with,” Vaughan explains. “With iconic figures like Elizabeth I or Marilyn Monroe, everyone has ideas about who they were, but we often gloss over the more interesting, troubled, vulnerable parts of their characters. Going back to those and trying to show an honest whole is really interesting - as audiences, we get so used to clichés that it's quite refreshing to challenge them.”
This year, Dyad tours three shows to Stafford Gatehouse, two drawn from the same well of inspiration, the other a reimagining of a more familiar novel. 
Weaving together several different stories, Female Gothic is the product of Vaughan's raiding of the treasure trove of underrated, under-read and often forgotten gothic tales penned by Victorian women writers.
“I'd been reading an MR James collection and in the introduction to this edition, it said that 85 to 90% of all Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories and tales of the macabre were written by women, so I decided to do some research. It's fascinating: loads of the writers we now know for other things, like Gaskell and Edith Wharton, were all part of this. Even E Nesbit, who we think of as a children's writer, was far better known for these kinds of tales in her own time. Then there are others like ME Braddon, who was almost as famous as Dickens at one point but has been mostly forgotten since. She wrote about 50 novels and absolutely hundreds of short stories, almost all of which are out of print now.”
Marking something of a departure from Dyad's usual style of theatre, the production uses the device of a central narrator figure with her own dark story as a framework around which various tales can coalesce. Through this character, Vaughan is also able to interpret and comment on the stories.
“I wanted to somehow join them all together in a bigger world rather than just having separate tales. Of those I found, some are written in first person and some in third person, and lots of them have a kind of narrator figure, so to create this character, I've compiled material from some of the stories that I haven't included in the show in full.”
In turn, Female Gothic led to the development of a second show, Christmas Gothic, in which the same central character returns with a whole new set of spooky stories.
“One of the things I discovered was that, whereas we tend to see these tales as being a very autumnal, Halloweeny thing, the Victorians viewed them as something very festive. If you think of A Christmas Carol, for instance, it's one of our most famous Christmas stories, but it's also a ghost story. Christmas shows are so popular - people love going to the panto - that I decided there must be a market for this, and that was backed up by the fact that in the original tour, nearly all the shows sold out!”
Meanwhile, the third show heading for Stafford this year is one that places even greater demands on Vaughan as a solo performer. A unique adaptation of Virginia Woolf's classic 1925 novel, Dalloway, sees Vaughan play multiple characters in the same story, all without the help of costume changes or any supporting cast members.
“Dalloway is one of my favourite things I've been in,” she gushes. “I love the novel - it's so beautiful, and deals with a lot of issues that are really relevant to us now, like mental health and the ways in which we hide our real selves from the world. The story takes place on one day and centres on this middle-aged socialite, Clarissa Dalloway, and Septimus Smith, a soldier returning from the First World War. The two never meet, but through various events, we see how they each affect each other. We were really interested in this idea that we're all connected on some level, and we thought that having one person play all of the characters would be an interesting way of representing that.”
If you're thinking that this all sounds insanely ambitious, you're not alone. Even Vaughan herself was far from free of reservations about performing alone when the idea was first suggested to her.
“I actually started doing this quite recently within the scheme of my career. I'd been doing fairly well as a 'normal' actor, but the larger the theatres and the egos of some of the performers I was working with became, the more I felt that I was losing sight of why I became an actor in the first place. I'd always loved the tradition of people coming into a dark room and just listening to a story, and I remember standing in a 1,500-seat theatre with an audience who were miles away and realising that I was looking for something else.
“The following year, I met a producer called Guy Masterton who offered to teach me how to produce. He suggested that I do a solo show, and at the time it just sounded like the most terrifying thing I could imagine. But the more we talked about it, the more I got used to the idea, and I started putting together a piece called Austen's Women. When I eventually came to perform it, once I'd got over that initial rabbit-in-the-headlights feeling, I immediately fell in love with it. It just felt like the most intimate, honest theatrical experience I'd been part of for years.”
For Vaughan, the most exciting thing about performing alone in smaller venues is the direct connection she can foster with an audience - sometimes to a greater extent than viewers are aware!
“I love the fact that the audience are completely on the journey with you, and I think they enjoy it too, being able to see the whites of an actor's eyes. I remember once after a show I was standing next to someone in the loos, and she couldn't believe that I recognised her from the audience.”
Of course, it's not just important for viewers to connect with a performer. For a piece of theatre to really be effective, an actor must transcend this, persuading the audience of the realness of the characters and allowing them to temporarily suspend their disbelief. Naturally, this presents a major challenge for a solo performer, but it's one that Vaughan seems to relish.
“There are times when it feels like it's going to be really hard, particularly when I'm playing male characters, but you just have to breathe and let them come through like oil on top of water. One of the things I've learned from Dalloway is the importance not just of what a character says but of how they say it. The words someone uses and even the cadence of their sentences informs exactly who they are, and the physicality kind of follows on from that. During rehearsals, each one becomes very distinct, taking on their own vocal palette and physical expression. Of course, I never see them, but I've been told by other people that they forget they're watching me - that they don't even see me or what I'm wearing after a while. So I think if you ignite an audience's imagination in the right way, they will do a lot of the work for you.”

Dyad Theatre perform Dalloway at Stafford Gatehouse on 27 September; Female Gothic on 31 October, and Christmas Gothic on 20 December.