Interview with Craig Alexander
Craig Alexander on Gothic Horror, The Chosen Vessel, and Telling Dark Truths
In darkness, hard truths are brought to light
Craig Alexander is a Canberra-based actor and theatre maker. Having just recently written and starred in his first full-length feature film, Snatchers, Craig is relishing a return to the stage in Dylan Van Den Berg’s The Chosen Vessel, which premieres at The Street Theatre on 9 August.
Craig spoke to MARION in the thick of rehearsals for this adaptation of Barbara Baynton’s iconic gothic Australian short story, which he says reveals rich new ways of seeing Australia’s colonial past.
Craig plays multiple characters, including the menacing figure of Baynton’s swagman. He brings his own unique nuance to the role, informed by a lifelong love of the horror genre, and the power of its thrilling rhythms of tension and release to guide us through moral turbulence.
Craig Alexander
Photo Credit: Novel Photographic
For those who might not have read The Chosen Vessel, can you tell us a bit about the original and the metamorphosis that it's undergone in this adaptation for the stage?
Craig Alexander: Barbara Baynton wrote the original short story as a kind of response to The Drover's Wife. She wanted to capture the darkness and the danger for a woman in the Australian bush, and so went to the very tragic case of a woman being murdered by a swagman, which was very different to the romanticised version of the Waltzing Matilda swagman archetype. What Dylan Van Den Berg has done is twisted that tale and put a very clear Black lens on top of it. The woman from Baynton's original story is a white woman, but in this play Dylan's written an Aboriginal woman.
What were the things that pulled you in and made you really want to be a part of this story?
Craig Alexander: Coincidentally, I actually did an adaptation of The Chosen Vessel with the original story about 20 years ago for the Williamstown Literary Festival … being a big horror fan, I love that kind of thriller. It's such a good creepy tale, especially the swagman’s character. I love Dylan's work and have known him for some time, so the opportunity to work on one of Dylan's plays is something no actor would pass up.
What's challenged you the most about this role and this story?
Craig Alexander: Definitely the horrors of the Indigenous people’s experiences throughout colonisation. Working with artists from the Black community who experience that viscerally is actually the biggest challenge, and to be the white man in the room that is also playing all the bad white men of the time is quite a challenge. It's quite a difficult space to sit in to wrestle with my own guilt or all those demons of my heritage. Not that we delve into that specifically in the play. It certainly isn't a browbeating story about colonisation and its evils. It's actually a very personal story about this woman, but for us to tell the story we had to explore it. It's a big thing to grapple with.
The Chosen Vessel Craig Alexander as the Priest
Photo Credit: Novel Photographic
And you are depicting more than one character in this play?
Craig Alexander: Yes, so there's several men that I play including the swagman who features quite heavily in the original story. The horseman that found the dying woman; the priest that he goes to speak to; and then various travellers including the woman’s husband. And then there's a really interesting kind of ‘B story’. Dylan's got a young boy and young girl and they really show how hate is learned. There’s also some really gorgeous, funny little scenes where we see those small, beautiful moments of hope.
How is that balance achieved so that your audience is able to experience the visceral immersion in the story, but also have space to process what they're watching?
Craig Alexander: Yes, this is actually what Dylan and the director, Abbie-lee Lewis, have done incredibly well. What it's leaning into is very much that ‘Aboriginal Gothic’ as Dylan refers to it. It’s a genre which gives you a sense that you can step back. You can as an audience member appreciate the horror and then the messages within.
What has that First Nations reclaiming of the Gothic genre helped you to see freshly?
Craig Alexander: I mean, when you hear that concept of ‘Gothic’ you tend to think of The Lady in Black and those very creepy visions. But to plonk that into the Australian pioneer landscape actually brings it into a really interesting world that is very well known to Australians. It feels so present in terms of where we're at with that reconciliation story. I think Dylan's found the perfect medium for something like this that allows for truth telling, but in a really entertaining way.
What is involved in taking what is quite a brief short story and spooling it out for a play of an hour or so in length?
Craig Alexander: What Dylan's done is take the short story as inspiration. There are some really clear moments that are pulled straight from Baynton’s text, but then one of the joys of adaptation is you can pull out a little bit of her story and then go deeper into the world, which isn't quite like Baynton’s. It allows for a little more hope, the way that Dylan's transformed the story.
And then we get that gorgeous scene, which is so prevalent in the Baynton story, of the swagman coming to the house. It’s my favourite scene in the play. It's just so beautifully written, and Dylan’s extended this so it makes the audience sit right on the edge.
That scene is so tense. And even though in the original she breaks free, and it's the beginning of the end for her, you still get this relief that she's left that claustrophobic shack.
Craig Alexander: Yes. That breaking free is quite a prominent part of what Dylan has put into it. This idea of returning to Country for this Indigenous woman in this situation. There's a lot that depicts the house as her little prison, and then when she leaves, she’s trying to get back home, which makes it even more tragic. It's still a hard ending, but I will say, Dylan does leave us with some hope for the future. There's also this beautiful spirit of the narrator in this version that ties it all together and brings the story to a contemporary audience. That's where the hope sits.
Dylan Van Den Berg and Abbie-lee Lewis in rehearsal.
Photo Credit: Nathan Smith Photography
You yourself have been inspired by another late 19th century short story in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher. Tell me about your relationship with that text, and how it's brought you to this project which has resulted in your first feature film, Snatchers.
Craig Alexander: I particularly love that classic horror genre and all that that beautiful cinematic landscape … I was looking for another piece that I could do as a solo show for stage in that horror world and stumbled across The Body Snatcher, and was playing around with that as a stage adaptation. I then realised that this actually might be a really interesting story to tell on screen, because I wanted to contemporise it a little bit. And then after years of writing and developing and trying to find funding, we shot it in Canberra last May with probably 95 per cent cast and crew from Canberra. We had our world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival in London a bit over a month ago.
The Chosen Vessel - LailaThaker.
Photo Credit: Novel Photographic
Congratulations! Was that your first time writing a full-length feature film?
Craig Alexander: Yes. I've done some shorts and played around in some documentary spaces, but that was the first full-length feature, and hopefully not the last! Filmmaking is, especially in the indie film world, quite exhausting because a lot rests on a small number of people. It's a quite a marathon. Even when you finish the principal photography and finish your shoot, there's still so much to be done, including getting it in front of an audience.
What did you enjoy about the writing process for a feature film? Before the stress and duty kicked in, were there wonderful moments of flow?
Craig Alexander: I love the writing experience. One of the things I really enjoyed through my adaptation of Snatchers was that I had come from a theatrical background, so I was more than happy to play with form and play with how I told stories. As much as it's a dark comedy, in the thriller/horror genre, it's actually about how we tell stories and what truth we tell in those stories to our closest friends. I really lent into that. There’s a dance number and there are these random stories that come out that are played with in a really fun theatrical way, but are working in this very dark space.
Do you mind giving our readers a little introduction to Snatchers?
Craig Alexander: Snatchers is a dark comedy thriller about a couple of old mates who steal a corpse planning on selling her organs to make a buck, but get thrown a curveball when she actually wakes up on the operating table. Then they have to decide whether they go through with it anyway, because she's still worth quite a lot of money. And the Jane Doe character obviously has different ideas for her fate at that point. What I was playing with was the idea of the exploitation of the working class and using that selling of organs as a metaphor for exploitation of labour. There's quite a lot of my ‘lefty’ ideals locked into that little tale, but in an hilarious and fun and thrilling way.
And to push it a little bit further I actually set it in a more dystopian version of Australia, so I could push that late stage capitalist kind of terror that sits on me all the time and amplify that. It comes back to what I was saying about the joys of playing in the horror genre. You can push some things to make a bolder statement, and people accept it because they're there for the chills and the scares, and hopefully they walk away, and it sits in the back of their mind, and they think about it later.
Why is horror such a good vehicle for exploring morality?
Craig Alexander: That's a really good question. I particularly like comedy horror because I think the elements of a scare and a comedy gag are so perfectly intertwined. It's just that basic tension and release part of storytelling. You hold attention and hit the punchline. We want to look at evil in a safe kind of way, in the sense that we can look at it from a distance. It offers that kind of cathartic release of the stress and anxieties that we all have within contemporary society. That release is the same as a comedy – we go to laugh, or we go to get scared, because it's a safe space to let go.
And in the case of seeing a play, you get to sit alongside others and be scared together, which is always more palatable, isn't it?
Craig Alexander: Yes, and it’s the same as a cinematic experience as well. Sitting in a large room with a lot of people that feel the fear and jump when they need to, is a joy. I actually think that's one of the things we're missing a lot these days is that idea of community and coming together over stories as opposed to being in our lounge rooms by ourselves.
The Chosen Vessel - Craig Alexander and LailaThaker.
Photo Credit: Novel Photographic
You mentioned the very heavy things you're exploring as actors in this production of The Chosen Vessel. What has it been like working as a cast in this fresh and moving and exciting way of telling this story?
Craig Alexander: The rehearsal room for a production is probably one of my favourite places in the world. It's a safe room that you can play in and experience the joy of spontaneous creation. That thing you mentioned before with writing, when you just get into flow, and the story goes where you don't expect it, and it's just coming from somewhere else. The feel of that in the rehearsal room, with a group of people that are doing that collaboratively is wonderful.
Abbie-lee Lewis is a wonderful director and very generous. So as much as we're dealing with dark stuff, it can be quite joyous.
Is there any advice that you've been given in your writing life or your acting career that you carry with you that you can share with our readers?
Craig Alexander: There are quite a few things, but probably the biggest one would be that you need to learn to trust your instincts entirely. As an actor, one of the biggest things is to be present. We have that Stanislavski idea that there's always 1 per cent actor in the back of your head and 99 per cent character. And the 1 per cent actor is thinking ‘oh, am I in the right light? Am I moving well? Is my voice good?’ All those technical things. As a writer sometimes you just have to get out of your own way and trust that wherever it's going is right.
Trust your gut, trust your instincts and commit.
What’s on the horizon for you creatively?
Craig Alexander: Obviously The Chosen Vessel opens shortly, and after that I have a little bit of a break, and then I'm actually doing another piece with the Street Theatre in Nigel Featherstone's new work, so I'll be performing in that as well. I’ll also be developing some more projects for The Horse Media, which is the company that I set up to do Snatchers. One of these will be in the horror genre: a kind of Hallmark romance Christmas-comedy-meets-the-Evil-Dead, playing with those two tropes and subverting the idealistic story line.
Commissioned by The Street, The Street company’s world premiere of The Chosen Vessel, Barbara Baynton’s short story adapted by award-winning Palawa playwright Dylan Van Den Berg, opens on 9 August through 24 August 2025 at The Street Theatre. This production is a bold re-imagining of the Australian 1896 classic exploring the isolation and oppression experienced by women in the Australian bush in the 19th century.
Craig Alexander:
Craig Alexander is an award-winning Australian actor, writer, and filmmaker known for his keen ability to blend comedy and tragedy alongside his diverse range of creative skills.
Armed with a B.A. (Honours) in Acting from CSU, Craig has been a prominent figure in the theatre industry for nearly two decades. His recent focus has shifted toward captivating screen content, working both in front of and behind the camera.
With an array of short films, web-series, and documentaries under his belt, Craig has proven his talent on both sides of the camera, earning him recognition at various film festivals across the country, including an Innovation in Storytelling Award for his documentary piece Together Alone and multiple Best Actor nods.
Further Reading:
Getting to Know: Playwright Dylan Van Den Berg in conversation with Rebecca Clode
Barbara Baynton, The Chosen Vessel (review), Whispering Gums