What’s the story with the Elephant’s head?
I do love the inquisitive nature of people who apply for The Applied Art of Acting. Are you going to turn me into an elephant? Kind of… But not really.
The Elephant Head is a mask that I commissioned for Company D Theatre’s production of “in 1916”. This play was about Roger Casement and followed a dual narrative of Casement’s imprisonment in the Tower of London and subsequent execution for smuggling arms into Ireland for the uprising, and the incredible story, in the same year, of Mary the Circus Elephant who was hanged to death by a railway crane in an American town for killing her handler who had constantly mistreated her while she suffered tooth-ache.
Because I have a slightly bizarre imagination, the similarities of the two cases, which occurred in parallel times in parallel countries was too good to ignore and I wrote the play for Company D and commissioned the mask back in 2007.
Then, rather than put the mask on some enormous lad, I decided to go the other way and place it on a dainty and exceptional female actor/dancer, Donna Bradley. So the body you see there is Donna’s.
To me though, it became a symbol for the dichotomies of strength and fragility, of power and subtly, of beauty and terror, of the primal and the trained, of freedom in impossible constraint.
These are some of the wonderful and terrible things actors must be and navigate and endure.
So Mary became a symbol of all my work as a teacher of acting as a high art… And so she lives on the poster of The Applied Art of Acting. And always will… whether it’s good marketing or not.

D