Logie Award-winning actor Danielle Cormack will star in Queensland Theatre‘s production of Hedda as the theatre prepares to close on another successful season. Opening on Saturday 10 November in the Bille Brown Theatre, London-playwright Melissa Bubnic’s production of Henrick Ibsen’s Hedda showcases a host of talented female actors.
Danielle Cormack plays the role of Hedda, whose life is railing against her. She is married to drug slinger George Tesman , but unsatisfied with her role as housewife in a monstrous Gold Coast mansion. She wants something more and 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?
Melissa Bubnic explains her reasoning for making the George Tesman character a drug slinger. “I didn’t feel that academics arguing over the meaning of life and losing a manuscript felt inherently dramatic to me for today’s audience,” she says. “Drugs, violence, death – all of that felt immediately higher stakes. This is a world where if you make a dud move, the consequences can be catastrophic.” Bubnicthis says that Cormack’s Hedda is “completely unapologetically self-serving”. “She’s after what she wants and everyone else is collateral. She doesn’t have the ennui, restlessness, longing for beauty of the original Hedda. My Hedda is a woman on a mission.”
Director Paige Rattray has directed two of Queensland Theatre’s most powerful stage productions in Black is the New White and Scenes from a Marriage. She says that Ibsen was a radical thinker in his time and Melissa Bubnic’s reimagining is equally as radical for now. “We were interested in taking one of the ‘great’ female roles and tipping the idea of the tragic female lead on its head,” she explains. “Our Hedda isn’t a bored housewife. She’s a woman with a huge amount of agency who wants to rebuild the family name and be autonomous, and she will do anything to make that happen.”
Hedda will play at the Bille Brown Theatre from 10 November to 8 December. Tickets are available online or by calling 1800 355 528.
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