Not In Kansas

"It's been a big process and it's been very daunting, but I guess that's what you expect when you work with The Danger Ensemble,” Mellor laughs – a little nervously. “It's quite a different and exciting way of working. For The Danger Ensemble, too. It's the first time they've worked with a writer. So, it's bringing something different to both our worlds.”

Maxine Mellor speaks with a mix of genuine excitement and no small amount of terror. She's talking about working with The Danger Ensemble to create an adaptation of The Wizard Of Oz for this year's Brisbane Festival. It's a massive clash of approaches. Mellor is a traditional playwright. The Danger Ensemble are anything but.

“They're kind of all about not making anything comfortable,” Mellor says with another laugh. “Steven [Mitchell Wright, The Danger Ensemble director] is very interested in the collision of ideas. Finding where those ideas don't meet. It's a new place to get ideas from. You know, rather than this comfortable sort of process where everyone is super-diplomatic and knows exactly what their role is and what they're supposed to contribute, it was more like a...” she pauses and searches for the phrase, “a real beautiful chaos, in a way.”

The overall process was one of devising and refining. Ideas bounced between The Danger Ensemble's cast of creatives and Mellor and gradually refined into something resembling a cohesive whole. Instead of adapting the mythology that everyone's aware of, Mellor and The Danger Ensemble opted for a new spin on the world.

“We all came to it with a clean slate. It was really a matter of building it from the original story up and really asking ourselves what Wizard Of Oz means to us now. Steven was in no way interested in doing a literal retelling of the original story,” Mellor says. “It went into all these tangents. Judy Garland, Andy Warhol... All these people affected by Oz.”

The plot of the final production is entirely too detailed to do justice in a sentence. Suffice to say, they've devised a sly, sad, romantic spin on the world of Oz. There's no telling how audiences will receive it, though. Mellor's fully aware that she's dealing with legendary material and expectations of a more conventional story will be high.

“It's sort of about one woman finding peace with her inner demons and, through that, finding a home,” Mellor says of the work. “It was always a struggle knowing how literal we were going with a story, but we eventually realised that I should just do what I do. I think it's still a recognisable narrative. It's just done in a very heightened, poetic way.”