Elena Carapetis Comedy Of Errors

Australia's national Shakespeare company, Bell Shakespeare and the State Theatre Company of South Australia are collaborating for the first time to bring to life Shakespeare's 600-year-old play Comedy Of Errors, this time delivered in a contemporary Australian way. Since premiering in Adelaide, the play has been met with an overwhelming response. “With a comedy you can pretty much tell straight away if the audience is on board because you have this wave of energy coming back to you via this thing called a laugh,” jokes actor Elena Carapetis. “So far all of our crowds have been extremely vocal, and that's a really great thing. When an audience has forgotten itself and is relaxed and in the story enough to feel comfortable about laughing out loud with [hundreds of] other people, then that's a really good thing – I feel like we're doing our job.”

What has made Comedy Of Errors so successful is its ability for the setting and the ten-strong cast to connect with people of different generations. “Imara Savage, our director, has created a world that's so Australian and young. It's vibrant, but completely true to the story that Shakespeare wanted to tell. She said, 'Okay, in Shakespeare's time the character would have been represented like this, but in our time and in this world, it can be represented like this'. My character, for example, is almost based on a Kardashian,” says Carapetis. “[And] instead of going from 9am to 6pm, the play goes from 9pm to 6am. It's a mad cat night through Kings Cross in Sydney; a real contemporary, urban, young pop-culture-laden spin on the show.”

In a twist of fate, Carapetis began her stage career performing Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth in 1988 and years later finds herself again tackling Shakespeare's eclectic repertoire. “Unlike, 'regular acting', Shakespeare requires a particular athleticism to all of your skills as an actor: vocally, physically, intellectually. In any other regular play if you lose the text you can sort of ad lib and the audience might not know, but an audience that is going to see Shakespeare will know the text inside out.”

Carapetis' long acting resume is a combination of stage and screen performances including 2005 independent film Look Both Ways, theatre production Truck Stop and cult teen drama series Heartbreak High, though it's television that gets her stopped in the street. “I do get recognised for Heartbreak High... Most recently I've been on a TV commercial and people recognise me more from that than they do theatre. Television has a way of framing you so that people remember you more clearly than theatre, but also less people unfortunately see theatre. Hopefully we can change that.”