Shakespeare role for local girl Eleni with acting in her blood

Eleni Cassimatis can’t remember a time she didn’t want to act.

Performing seemed always in her blood, she says, after recently landing a major role with the prestigious Bell Shakespeare company in a Sydney Opera House production of “Hamlet”.

“I don’t ever remember telling my parents that I wanted to be an actor, they kind of knew that’s what I wanted to do,” she explains.

“I did all the musicals at school, and I also used to put on little shows at home with my sister…but both my parents tell me I got it from them,” she laughs.

With Hamlet, she’s in the unique position of having seen the current production performed live but, which due to lockdown, has now led to her being cast as “the Player Queen” in this “play within a play”.

“The play was meant to happen in 2020 and I actually saw it at the (Sydney) Opera House… I was just blown-away, but the schedule was for it to run in 2020, then 2021, and now 2022, and this led to a couple of casting changes, including for my part,” she said.

After finishing school, the former local girl and Kinross student headed to the bright lights of Sydney with an inborn work ethic that has rarely seen her idle.

“I left school and travelled and worked my way around to Sydney where I started doing as many acting courses as I could find,” she explained.

Graduating from the Actors’ Centre Australia, her work since has included short films, poetry readings, and voice-over work.

“I’ve been very, very lucky, I did a couple of independent shows, and then in 2019 with the company ‘Poetry in Action’ where we travelled through Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Dubai, and finished that with the ‘the Players’ for Bell Shakespeare,” she added.

In the 1960s Danish setting for this production of Hamlet, she will also be touring to the Melbourne Arts Centre and Canberra Theatre Centre and was also recently chosen in Bell Shakespeare’s “In A Nutshell” in which she will be among the first cast to tread the boards at the company’s new theatre at Walsh Bay in Sydney.

With everyone affected by the pandemic that effectively stalled all live performances in Australia, Eleni determined to remain busy by keeping her craft-up via new technologies.

“During lockdown we were getting on Zoom and reading Shakespeare plays together… I tried always to keep active and passionate about my work,” she said.

This passion is partly-inspired by the performative nature of her craft and its ability to relate essential truths to do with our lives.

“I think it’s the story-telling and being able to tell important and exciting stories. Yet at the same time, we can go through anything, and it helps us understand ourselves,” she explained. “I love analysis, and art has so much power to do that,” she added.

Eleni doesn’t subscribe to a particular acting school, seeing each role as a separate challenge to be approached with fresh eyes, something she believes is easy with the “Bard of Avon” due to his having performed in many of his own productions .

“The process is different from project to project…the thing about Shakespeare is, that he gives you so much in the language to work on, and that’s partly because he would have been an actor in his own plays.

“He would have gone home and written the next day’s scenes,” she said, listing “Macbeth”, “Twelfth Night”, and “As You Like it” as some of her favourite of his works.

Modern playwrights she enjoys include Americans Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, and Neil Simon.

Eleni, however, doesn’t hold the view of many stage actors that television and cinema are lesser forms of her craft.

“I love theatre, the direct contact with the audience and the story-telling, but I do have a soft spot for film, they’re just different mediums.”

Eleni will remain busy during the theatrical run of Shakespeare’s longest play; she has also signed-on as the characters of the courtier, “Osric” and the second grave-digger with Harriet Gordon-Anderson in the lead role.

With her Opera House debut in Sydney in March next year, Eleni takes her work seriously, but remains at heart an unaffected Colour City girl who likes keeping everything in perspective.

“They say in acting to ‘hold on tightly and let go lightly’… Orange is my favourite place, it’s still home.”