Maggie Haining

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 Norw ... (read more)

Nearer the Gods, the new play from David Williamson, has been described as ‘a big departure’ from his wonted repertoire of Australian middle-class studies. It departs from contemporary Australia for seventeenth-century England in exploring the events that lead to the publication of Isaac Newton’s revolutionary text Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), and how it almost didn ... (read more)