'Hedda Gabler is railing against her life. She didn’t marry bogan drug slinger George Tesman so she could play housewife in a monstrous Gold Coast mansion with white leather couches, blingy chandeliers and endless rounds of Aperol Spritz.
'She wants something much more. Now her old flame, Ejlert Løvborg, is out of prison and off the junk. Is he about to slice off a piece of George’s empire? Maybe Hedda can pull some strings to work this to her advantage.
'Logie Award-winning actor Danielle Cormack (Wentworth, Rake) is the Hedda we’ve all been waiting to see. Melissa Bubnic gives us a local version of the Henrik Ibsen classic that is as dangerous and surprising as its heroine.'
Source: Queensland Theatre Company.
Produced by Queensland Theatre Company at the Bille Brown Theatre, 10 November to 8 December 2018.
Director: Paige Rattray.
Cast includes Jimi Bani, Bridie Carter, Danielle Cormack, Jason Klarwein, Joss McWilliam, Andrea Moor, and Helen O'Leary.
Designer: David Fleischer.
Lighting Designer: Emma Valente.
Dramaturg: Marcel Dorney.
'One of the quandaries facing contemporary adaptations of classics is the risk of the story being lost in a translation, which can isolate the work from the original culture and text. Melissa Bubnic’s reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (which had its première in Munich in 1891) runs no such risk. Directed by Paige Rattray, Hedda removes Ibsen’s characters from nineteenth-century Norway and the world of academia and situates them in present-day Gold Coast on the deck of a ‘McMansion’. Although Hedda retains the original characters’ names, the setting is about as far away from Ibsen as you can imagine.' (Introduction)
'One of the quandaries facing contemporary adaptations of classics is the risk of the story being lost in a translation, which can isolate the work from the original culture and text. Melissa Bubnic’s reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (which had its première in Munich in 1891) runs no such risk. Directed by Paige Rattray, Hedda removes Ibsen’s characters from nineteenth-century Norway and the world of academia and situates them in present-day Gold Coast on the deck of a ‘McMansion’. Although Hedda retains the original characters’ names, the setting is about as far away from Ibsen as you can imagine.' (Introduction)