Ellen Fanshaw

Ellen Fanshaw is one of New Burbage's leading actresses, a veteran of the festival with a sharp tongue and a taste for drama both onstage and off. She's ambitious, self-mythologizing, and still entangled with her old flame and former director Geoffrey Tennant, whose return to the company throws her carefully maintained composure into disarray.

Martha Burns plays Ellen with a wonderful mix of vanity and vulnerability, letting the character's theatrical grandeur crack just enough to reveal real longing underneath. The writing gives her genuinely funny, cutting lines, but it's Burns's comic timing and emotional precision that make Ellen's mess of a life feel both absurd and touching.