A new stage adaptation of Melina Marchetta’s classic spins the Italian Australian experience into a universal story of otherness, family and freedom
hanella Macri was in her early teens when she picked up her older sister’s copy of Looking For Alibrandi. Despite her own Italian heritage, she couldn’t quite understand why being a third-generation Italian migrant in 1990s Sydney caused 17-year-old Josie Alibrandi – the protagonist of Melina Marchetta’s 1992 novel – so much grief.
I was determined to keep my distance, so that Vidya Rajan and Stephen Nicolazzo could make Alibrandi their ownSince its publication 30 years ago, the novel and Marchetta’s 2000 film adaptation have become one of Australia’s seminal coming-of-age stories, and a staple of high school English curriculums. Marchetta adapted the book in 1995 for a small Pact theatre production, but since then has turned down proposals to revisit Alibrandi.
‘I could just imagine them letting a wog be prime minister,’ joked Pia Miranda as Josie in the film Looking For Alibrandi. Thirty years after the book was published, Anthony Albanese is in office.For Rajan, the intergenerational bond between the three Alibrandi women – Josie, her mother Christina , and her nonna Katia – remains the heart of the story.
“For a lot of migrant girls, and the first generation of any age really, you often feel that the freedom you’re seeking is away from whatever the home space is, and whatever culture that represents. I think that’s something that she has to come to terms with.”
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