Clash over the classics: A perspective on the adaptations vs. new works debate

There’s an interesting article in the Review section of today’s The Weekend Australian, about adaptations and their prevalence in Australia’s current theatrical landscape. Rosemary Neill asks if it is “a sign of the bankruptcy of original ideas, or [if] it heralds a confident approach to great works of drama?”

In the past two years in Sydney alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in ‘updated’ or ‘new versions’ by various writers and directors (and writer-directors). Productions of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova (as The Business), Chekhov’s The Seagull, Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Euripedes’ Medea, and the forthcoming interpretation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, have all been rewritten, adapted or reinterpreted from their original texts. While these have resulted in many critical and popular successes, is it hinting at a wider, more alarming problem – a dearth of ‘large-scale’ Australian works?

A day at the festival

Each May, the Sydney Writers’ Festival rolls around and I look at the program of events, highlight a few that interest me and then… do nothing about it. I realized the other day that the last time I went to the Writers’ Festival was in 2004 with school, (I’ve still got the ticket stub for it somewhere).

But this year, seeing how writing is what I want to do and what I love doing, what I’m passionate about, I thought that it would be beneficial – productive – if I went to something. So I consulted the program and chose three events that sounded interesting (there were others, but other factors had to be taken into consideration) and, as luck would have it, they were all on the same afternoon. I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty details of each of the three events because it won’t mean anything, but I do want to make a few observations.