Culture wars and a swing to the right: A new take on Gone With the Wind is coming

A satirical new take on Gone With the Wind takes to the stage at the Malthouse Theatre next year, as part of a slate of world premieres revealed in the theatre’s newly unveiled 2027 program.

Margaret Mitchell’s classic 1936 American Civil War novel, perhaps best known for its 1939 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh as heroine Scarlett O’Hara, is transplanted to contemporary Australia, with the culture wars and the split in the political right taking centre stage.

The map of Australia is literally turned on its side, with Western Australia standing in for the South, and the East Coast cities becoming the Union.

“The Civil War is the perfect vehicle to talk about an Australia that feels like it’s tearing at the seams,” says James Jackson, one of the creators of the show. “We’re interested in what happens when one political class gets replaced by another.”

Gone With the Wind is credited to Bloomshed, a loose collective of around 15 creatives, with scripts written collaboratively, and no distinct roles or leaders. Bloomshed has a track record of producing irreverent versions of classic texts. This year, their acclaimed reworking of Pride and Prejudice, also at Malthouse, turned the Regency novel into a satire of the Australian housing crisis.

Jackson says the adaptation will hew closely to Mitchell’s novel, despite its Australian setting and allusions to the Liberal Party and One Nation. “And Scarlett O’Hara inexplicably has a Southern accent, even though everyone else is Australian,” he says.

In another program highlight, acclaimed writer/actor Thomas Weatherall is known to theatre audiences for Blue, his 2023 one-man show at Sydney’s Belvoir, and to TV audiences as Malakai in Heartbreak High. Rather than bring Blue to Melbourne, Weatherall has nominated to develop a new work, Lucy, for his Victorian debut.

Lucy charts the development of a romantic relationship over time in what Malthouse artistic director Dean Bryant describes as “an interrogation of forever-love”.

Bryant has sought contemporary relevance in all of his choices for 2027. “We’re really asking, ‘What’s it for?’,” he says. “Why have you asked audience to leave their very comfortable houses with their very big TVs? You want to make sure you give them a story worth paying attention to. And what I’ve seen audiences respond to this year is new stories or new adaptations told in unusual ways.”

A number of other classics are being given a contemporary spin. The season opens with Eddie Perfect’s rewrite of Molière’s 17th century comedy The Tartuffe.

The original sees a religious zealot manipulate a household with smooth talk and divine virtue. In this new version, directed by Bryant, Perfect rewrites him as an AI-powered hairdressing robot.

“Tartuffe is able to mirror back to people what they want to hear, what they want to believe,” says Bryant. “And Eddie said, well, that’s AI now.” The show will see Perfect re-unite with his Beetlejuice co-star Karis Oka and also stars comedian and doctor, Noah Szto.

The Turn of the Screw, written by Keziah Warner and directed by Jessica Arthur, sees Tuuli Narkle take on every role, with Henry James’ classic ghost story reconfigured as the unravelling of an Australian au pair in an English country house. Warner takes a 21st century approach to the novel’s psychological thriller aspects.

“She thinks she’s going to have a Downton Abbey experience and it’s more like The Shining,” says Bryant.

Director Sarah Goodes and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith adapt Charlotte Wood’s Booker-nominated novel Stone Yard Devotional, starring Lisa McCune as a woman isolating herself from the modern world by moving into a convent in rural NSW. Visual artist Tamara Dean and sound artist Byron Scullin will bring an atmospheric evocation of the novel to the stage.

Karaoke provides a portal into Filipino politics in the 1980s-set Magic Sing: Pinoy Pop Power!, created by Victoria Falconer – musical director of Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent hit My Brilliant Career – alongside Bryant.

Bryant also directs Yve Blake’s intergenerational black comedy Jackpot, in which two siblings come to blows over an inheritance.

This is Bryant’s second program since his appointment as artistic director of Malthouse in 2025. The 2027 season comprises almost entirely new works – all but one of the eight shows is a world premiere. swim, written by Ellen van Neerven and directed by Andrea James, which explores gender and First Nations identity, was premiered by Griffin Theatre Company in 2024, but will be unfamiliar to Melbourne audiences.

“It puts the company under a degree of pressure, because everything has been tested for the first time,” says Bryant. “But I got into this whole game because I wanted to tell new stories and there is nothing more fulfilling for an audience than being told a new story really well.

“When it pays off, it’s so thrilling for the audience,” he says. “It’s why theatre exists in the first place.”

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