Inside "ROPE" Rehearsals
- Presidential Productions
- Dec 31, 2015
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 15
🎭 Inside Rehearsals: The Pressure Builds in ROPE
PERTH, WA — With just weeks to go until opening night, rehearsals are intensifying for ROPE, Presidential Productions’ sleek, minimalist psychological thriller set to premiere at Perth Fringe 2016.
Directed by James Cunningham, this adaptation of the classic 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton is not only period-free — it’s time-tight. The story unfolds in real time, inside a single room, across an uninterrupted 90 minutes. And in the rehearsal room, the challenge is palpable: there’s nowhere to hide.
“There’s no set changes, no scene breaks,” says Cunningham. “The actors are in that room the entire time, just like the audience. The tension has to be lived — not performed.”
At the core of ROPE is a moral puzzle. Two young men strangle a fellow student, hide his body in a wooden chest, and then host a cocktail party around it. Their justification? A kind of elitist intellectual theory — that some lives are more valuable than others.
For the cast, embodying characters who can commit (or suspect) such a crime requires more than just memorising lines. Rehearsals have focused on stillness, subtext, and the rhythm of real-time conversation. Every glance, pause, and shift in body language is charged with implication.
“The script works like a game of chess,” says one cast member. “You’re not just playing your own move — you’re anticipating someone else’s.”
To achieve this, Cunningham has structured rehearsals like an unbroken run — allowing the actors to live the play from start to finish. The blocking is precise, but the emotional trajectory is fluid. What starts as a cocktail party gradually collapses into something more claustrophobic.
🎬 Minimalism in Design, Maximalism in Tension
The design elements are sparse — a few chairs, a drinks cart, a chest — but the atmosphere is anything but empty. In rehearsals, the team has experimented with light cues, furniture placement, and even the tempo of footsteps to create a kind of invisible pressure cooker.
Lighting designer Tom Rourke has been in the rehearsal room from the beginning, crafting a plan that mirrors the emotional arc of the play. As the play progresses, light levels subtly dip. Shadows begin to crowd the space. A single overhead light is used to draw attention to the chest — the murder weapon and hiding place that sits, silently, centre stage.
The chest — handcrafted for the production and modelled after a vintage military-style storage box — has taken on a life of its own in rehearsals. In one actors’ words, “it’s like the sixth character.”
“Everything is performed around it,” Cunningham explains. “The audience never takes their eyes off it. And the characters have to pretend they’re not thinking about it.”
The company has also been exploring gesture and routine — how to pour a drink, how to touch the chest without seeming suspicious, how to let a pause land long enough to imply suspicion. The direction isn’t theatrical — it’s forensic.
With rehearsals now in their final stages, the ensemble is settling into the play’s demanding pace. Line runs are fast. Intensity is high. Every moment is accounted for — just like it is in the play. But that’s the point. ROPE isn’t just about murder. It’s about the illusion of control — and the way that illusion can fray under the scrutiny of others.
“We want the audience to feel like they’re watching something forbidden,” says Cunningham. “Not horror. Not gore. Just two men, trying to keep a secret — and one man trying to expose it.”
🎟️ ROPE performs at Murdoch University as part of FRINGE WORLD Perth 2014, for a strictly limited season. Tickets are available via fringeworld.com.au and this marks Presidential Productions’ debut at the festival. More information on our website.
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