‘It started with a really basic, “What if?” premise, which was: what if the characters from The Tempest were Iranian refugees and were in the Christmas Island detention centre,’ playwright Helen Machalias says of her new work, This Rough Magic.
‘You’ve got canonical Shakespearean work, but by having Farsi and Iranian culture, storytelling, narrative and poetry elevated in the work to be equal with the Shakespeare, it’s really hopefully making audiences think about what we consider to be classic texts of our time.’
