Big day.
1. I watched the last of Margaret's furniture being loaded on to a truck
2. I interviewed Danielle Cormack.
3. Margaret's house sale settled.
4. I had by first singing lesson.
If that isn't a day of contrasts, I don't know what is.
Probably best to concentrate on the good bits - the Danielle Cormack interview
Logie Award winning actor Danielle Cormack is no stranger to public
admiration.
Yet the Rake and Wentworth star admits there is nothing
quite like the buzz and energy you receive from an engaged theatre audience.
“In theatre when you get laughs or any
immediate response, it’s an aphrodisiac for us,” Cormack said. “We keep playing
for the response for the laugh.”
If it was a response they wanted it was a
response they will get when Hedda opens at Queensland Theatre Company’s Bille
Brown Theatre this week, if previews are anything to go by.
Cormack is Henrik Ibsen’s dangerous and feisty heroine in a re-imagined
version that has moved the action of the 1890 classic to the Gold Coast mansion
of a bogan drug pusher.
Amid the over-stuffed couches and blingy chandeliers of Garbler’s monstrous
new home with husband George Tesman is a version of Hedda that is in equal
measure everything and nothing like original.
“It’s
not often that you can be in an Ibsen play where within the space of two
minutes you’ve had a shot of vodka, a line of cocaine and cooked a steak on a
barbecue,” Cormack says.
The
Melissa Budnic adaptation is Ibsen … but not as we know it. It’s this which drew
Cormack to the role as she admits she found the Broadway revival of the classic
starring Mary-Louise Parker in the title role “quite stale”.
She
was convinced to make this her first Queensland stage performance by director
Paige Rattray who directed Cormack in the 2015 Budnic work Boys will be Boys for Sydney Theatre Company.
“When
Paige said Melisa was readapting it and that it would be a reimagining of Hedda
and contemporised and set on the Gold Coast well, that really excited me.”
Cormack
had every reason to be excited. This work is bitingly funny, insightful and
shocking – often all at in the same moment.
Rattray
says that while Budnic’s adaptation soars it never loses its sense of the
original Ibsen.
“It
was really interesting seeing the things that felt like the most unbelievable
were things from the original text,” she says.
For
Rattray, who was Queensland Theatre’s associate artistic director before
returning to STC as associate director earlier this year, Ibsen’s Hedda is a
rare and great female leading lady.
“I
was looking at the great female leads in history and quite often they are woman
with no agency who meet a tragic end,” says Rattray. “I am not necessarily
interested in staging those kind of plays. I would rather see plays where woman
have agency and drive and purpose, where they are superheroes.”
Cormack’s
Hedda has that drive and purpose as well as real menace. Whether she is a hero
or anti-hero is up for debate but what is unquestionable is that she is a
fierce woman who is in charge of her own destiny.
While
comparisons to the Ibsen text are inevitable Cormack is quick to reassure
audiences that the play requires no knowledge of the original to be understood,
appreciated and enjoyed.
Having
said that she admits a quick Google search will add a new layer of appreciation
for what Bosnic has done.
"I
just urge people to even just Wikipedia it. It will take five minutes but it
will really enrich the experience of seeing Hedda,” she laughs. “Yes there
might be some spoiler alerts in there but it is well worth it.”
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