Elephant Read Through, 2010

The cast and crew met for the very first time on Saturday, May 29, 2010. It was exciting to see them together after so many months of casting and interviewing tech specialists.  After coffee and a chat, the actors completed a read through of AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. 

"It was quite extraordinary seeing the play move beyond the point from which it was written," says Writer/Director, Robert Gough.  "Actors often have surprising nuances in their interpretation of their characters, and for me that was the highlight of Saturday's reading."   

ELEPHANT was originally read in the winter of 2008 with a completely different cast.  It was read again on March 2, 2009 at Melbourne Writers' Theatre in Carlton, Victoria.  From that reading, the producers decided that Bill Ten Eyck was so perfectly cast that the play's July, 2010 season was scheduled around Bill's availability.  

Pictured above: Actors Bill Ten Eyck and Jennifer Innes, May 29, 2010.   

For more rehearsal photographs, please visit our cast album. There's also some footage of Bill Ten Eyck as the irrepressible Wally Stern on our YouTube channel, ElephantStagePlay.  Enjoy!

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Casting News

Antipodean Theatre is pleased to announce that WILLIAM MORGAN and KARL COTTEE have joined the cast for the first run of An Elephant in the Room, opening at Theatre Works in St Kilda, Melbourne, in July, 2010.  

Will, who plays DAVID HAWTHORN (Dave), has spent the last six years working as a stage and film actor in Melbourne and London (Stratford Circus).  Will is currently an arts journalist for Channel 31's YARTZ program.  

Karl, who plays AARON HAMILTON, Lucy's younger brother,  studied drama in Melbourne and  New York.  Karl has performed in several plays at the Edinburge Fringe Festival, and also worked on Steven Spielberg and Tom Hank's The Pacific for 11 months.

For more, please visit Elephant's CAST page... 

And please stay tuned for news about the Indian Storyteller and snippets from Elephant rehearsals!

Jennifer Innes as Lucy Hamilton

Jennifer Innes plays Lucy Hamilton, a talented actress who lives in a small apartment across the hallway from Wally's Warehouse. Lucy loves her profession - the language, the art.  The transformative power of performance is her true passion. But all is not well...

Jennifer moved to Melbourne four years ago from Adelaide, and has worked on a number of challenging roles since then. With PMD Productions, she has appeared in Arcadia, Closer, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Three Sisters, The Merchant of Venice and Picasso at the Lapin Agile.  Prior to that she spent two years in London studying Classical Theatre at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. There she appeared in Much Ado about Nothing, Hamlet, The Philistines, The White Devil and The Provok'd Wife.  

Other productions have included Coriolanus, A Passage to India, Chinchilla, Stolen Moments and Low Level Panic, which Jennifer also produced for her Adelaide-born theatre company Scylla Productions.  She recently assistant directed Dogg'sHamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth and will be directing Liz Lochhead's Blood and Ice in October 2010. Jennifer is a familiar face on Australian television, and has appeared in a number of short films for the New York Film Academy and Utrtext Film Productions.

AN EXTRACT FROM THE PLAY #2

Hi Everybody!

Thanks again for all the interest in reading the script. We have casting in progress, set design is now complete, and we’ll start set building soon.

Anyway, here's the second extract...

A curious phenomenon of human behavior I’ve often observed is people’s passions for subjects, such as history, the sciences or sport. They are often unable to contain these passions within themselves and frequently feel the need to share them others less interested in the subject.

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NIGEL has placed a handset with speaker phone on Wally’s desk. NIGEL is crouched down and focused on connecting the phone.

WALLY: How’d you get into this business, Nigel?

NIGEL: I used to help my dad when I was a kid. He was with the PMG and he replaced the telex machines when they invented the fax...

WALLY: And when was the fax invented?

NIGEL: Eighties...?

WALLY: 1842. Alexander Bain was the man’s name and they used the new telegraph cable to send faxes across the English Channel, Paris to London. It worked by sending a metal engraving of the picture that was wrapped around a copper drum. Extraordinary. 1842, sending faxes 40 years before people started having telephone conversations...

NIGEL: Oh yeah...?

WALLY: Bain was actually experimenting with sending electrical current down a copper wire and there were some chemicals spilled onto some paper at the other end and it left a black mark. Or so the story goes. Imagine what people in those days thought when they heard about sending a picture down an electrical wire? They must have thought, “what bullshit”.

NIGEL is squatting down and concentrating on getting the line connected.

NIGEL: Yeah, what bullshit...

WALLY: Anyway, the military were always interested in them because of their potential for sending maps, and there was a commercial service in the US in 1902, but they weren’t really used until the First World War when they started using them for transmitting newspaper photos...

NIGEL has connected the new business line. NIGEL calls from his mobile in the midst of Wally’s technological lecture. The new business line rings.

NIGEL: How’s that?

WALLY: What, already? Nice one young Nigel!

WALLY picks up the line and listens to the dial tone. NIGEL has already packed his toolbox.

WALLY: Alright. So will your company bill me or are you ABN or Sole Trader or…?

NIGEL looks bewildered and doesn't know what to say, but WALLY soon picks up that NIGEL wants cash off the books… WALLY pays NIGEL with cash from his wallet.

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Above picture: Alexander Bain's improved facsimile, 1850.

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