The Two Worlds of Charlie F. is a British play that opens with an agonizing scene of an actor playing the role of a young soldier lying in an English hospital.
He’s coming out of a coma, screaming. In his delirium, he believes he has been captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they are questioning him under torture.
A British nurse tries to reassure him that he’s okay, he is in hospital. He swears at her, calls her a Taliban bitch, and continues screaming for help.
It continues until a young woman and an older man approach the bed. The character sees his fiancé, Laura, and his father.
Finally, he recognizes the truth. That he is safe, but badly injured.
All of the above is theatre, but it also happened. The actor pretending to be coming out of a coma is a real soldier, who really did lose his leg in Afghanistan just a few months earlier.
In the play, he shares the stage with other soldiers too, nearly all of them complete novices to the art of acting, all survivors of sometimes horrific injuries, all recruited to tell the story of what can, and does happen in war.
Placing disabled soldiers on the stage to act out their stories may never have been done before. But what is even more unusual is the story of that young man playing the lead.
He is a Royal Marine commando, one of the elite of the British forces.
But unlike others, he actually entered the military because of a bet. And he’s not from England. He’s a Canadian. From St. John’s, Newfoundland.
His name is Cassidy Little. And he still has trouble believing how he ended up on a British stage.
“I forget sometimes about how bizarre this entire evolution has been,” he told W5. “I mean, it blows my mind, this path I’ve taken.”
In fact, the path is so unusual that W5 did not believe it until it checked the facts.
Cassidy was born to military parents. His father, Clark Little, would rise to become a brigadier general in the Canadian Armed Forces.
But Cassidy did not share his parents’ interest in things military. Instead, it was theatre ....
