Interview by Erandhi Mendis // Photography by Simon Fazio
In an era where “happily ever after” feels increasingly tied to housing security rather than romance alone, an Australian reimagining of Pride and Prejudice trades Regency fantasy for rental inspections, economic precarity and contemporary anxieties around love, class and survival. Returning to the stage after a celebrated first season at Malthouse Theatre, John Collopy from the creative team behind the play discusses adapting Austen for the housing crisis generation, balancing political commentary with playfulness, and why Mr Bennet became a potted monstera.
Ramona: Congratulations on bringing Pride and Prejudice to the stage again after such a strong response last year – when you formed this show, what made now the right moment to revisit this story, and what felt newly urgent about telling it?
John: Thank you! We are thrilled Malthouse has given this show a second life! We felt that in the depths of the housing crisis – when owning a house feels more and more out of reach for our generation – why not revisit a text in which the ultimate fantasy is to not only fall in love, but to be lucky enough to fall in love with someone with a nice house, some land, and disposable income. Has the romantic dream moved from the idealistic to the practical? What does that mean for us, and for our society? Have I asked more questions than I’ve answered? Yes…sorry for that…
Your Pride and Prejudice reframes “happily ever after” through the lens of the housing crisis. In Austen’s world, marriage to the right man effectively guaranteed financial stability. How did you go about navigating the source material when partnership no longer secures a home or future?
We thought pretty heavily about what the modern version of Austen’s “right man” looked like, and what our version of “happily ever after” looked like, and tried to marry (pun fully intended) those ideals to create something that feels truthful enough to the source material while also offering something for contemporary audiences to chew on.
Following that – Austen’s original is deeply concerned with money, inheritance and social mobility. What did you discover when you translated those anxieties into today’s economy of rent bidding wars, side hustles and delayed adulthood?
Rather depressingly, we found that those anxieties still exist in a big way, and that ultimately, that is what makes Austen’s original so compelling and ripe for adaptation today.
The show asks big questions about “capital-L Love.” Do you think modern relationships are increasingly shaped by logistics eg. leases, salaries, geography – over romance? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
There are so many reasons for relationships (both platonic and romantic) working or failing, and it’s naive to think that logistics never play a part. Whether or not that’s a good thing is something we’ve discussed at length over the development of this work, and I don’t think we ever got any closer to an answer! What has appealed to audiences about Pride and Prejudice across its whole lifetime, and across mediums, is that in a world of logistics and rigid social conventions, the dream was (and still is) romance: Capital-L Love.
There’s something almost defiant about making a work this playful while dealing with economic precarity and climate anxiety. Is humour, for you, a coping strategy, a political tool, or both?
Absolutely both! It is extremely important to take serious things seriously, but when making theatre, an art form where you are forming a new community with the audience every night, humour is such an effective way to build a rapport with an audience without them switching off. We aren’t necessarily afraid of didacticism, but treating these topics with playfulness allows us to keep an audience smiling and engaged even while making a political point, which we think is much more enjoyable, and much more effective.
Mr Bennet as a potted monstera is a striking choice. What did turning the patriarch into a plant unlock symbolically?
For us it just made sense. Mr Bennet is merely a figurehead – a character who has very few desires, minimal struggles, and yet is somehow supremely needy, and mostly just causes problems. Turning him into a potted monstera, a plant favoured by renters who can move it from house to house as leases expire and rents go up, removes him of any agency, makes him little more than set dressing, and puts all of the focus on the struggles of Mrs Bennet and her five daughters.
You’ve described your work as blending “high art with cheap thrills” – dance breaks, heightened physicality, visual excess. What does that collision allow you to say that a more traditional adaptation couldn’t?
It allows us to be much cheekier! Adaptation is such a tricky thing, and if you are too reverent to the original, audiences have a habit of nitpicking any difference as either a poor choice or a clumsy failure. By being deliberately anachronistic, unapologetically irreverent, and making contemporary choices, we can say things that traditional adaptations simply can’t – because their framework is too rigid. We can also offer new perspectives that fans of the original text and its more traditional adaptations might not have seen before.
I’ve always felt a particular kind of yearning in Austen: romantic, social, financial. What do you feel yearning looks like for the generation you’re pitching this to, and how does it manifest on stage?
The yearning Austen writes is so fundamental to almost all modern romantic media that it is difficult to say how ours looks different. It still encompasses many of the elements of Austen, because so much romantic media relies on the same elements she relied upon. We’ve tried to satirise some of the elements that have since become tropes (enemies to lovers, or running romantically through the rain, for instance), as well as utilising those that still feel sincere, to create something that audiences may find satisfying, but that also recognises how formulaic romance stories have become in modern media.
There’s a kind of cultural amnesia in the current obsession with period dramas – they package up historically restrictive worlds (particularly for women) as something soft and desirable. Your work punctures that pretty forcefully. Did you anticipate resistance from audiences who want comfort, and what do you hope people sit with as they leave the theatre?
We really want audiences to reconsider the role of period pieces and their endless re-adaptation – and, as you say, whether they’re simply packaging up restrictive worlds into something nice and palatable, or whether they’re adding something meaningful to the discourse. We also want people to ask whether that’s actually a bad thing, to just have a nice story to watch or read, and reconsider the role of storytelling in the world we build for ourselves every day. Is it simplistic escapism? Is escapism bad? Is being constantly aware of the horrors of this world a good thing? We don’t know! Hopefully this show makes people think about that, and they have a good time doing so!
—
Pride and Prejudice plays at Malthouse’s Merlyn Theatre 14-23 May 2026.
Tickets are on sale now at malthousetheatre.com.au
PERFORMANCE DATES & TIMES
Previews: 7.30pm, Thursday 14 May
In Season: 6.30pm, Monday 18 May; 7.30pm, Tuesday-Saturday; 2pm, Saturday 23
May
Time to Talk: 7.30pm, Tuesday 19 May
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE CREDITS
Performers: Laura Aldous, Elizabeth Brennan, Syd Brisbane, Emily Carr, John
Marc Desengano, James Jackson, Anna Louey, Lauren Swain
Set Designer: Savanna Wegman
Costume Designer: Samantha Hastings
Lighting Designer: John Collopy
Sound Designer: Justin Gardam
Dramaturg: Emily O’Connor
Stage Manager: Jacinta Anderson
