Yet the Rake and Wentworth star admits there is nothing quite like the buzz and energy you receive from an engaged theatre audience.

“In theatre when you get laughs or any immediate response, it’s an aphrodisiac for us,” Cormack said. “We keep playing for the response for the laugh.”

If it was a response they wanted it was a response they got when Hedda opened at Queensland Theatre Company’s Bille Brown Theatre this week.

Cormack is stunning as Henrik Ibsen’s dangerous and feisty heroine in a re-imagined version that has moved the action of the 1890 classic to the Gold Coast mansion of a bogan drug pusher.

Amid the over-stuffed couches and blingy chandeliers of Garbler’s monstrous new home with husband George Tesman is a version of Hedda that is in equal measure everything and nothing like original.

“It’s not often that you can be in an Ibsen play where within the space of two minutes you’ve had a shot of vodka, a line of cocaine and cooked a steak on a barbecue,” Cormack says.

The Melissa Budnic adaptation is Ibsen … but not as we know it. It’s this which drew Cormack to the role as she admits she found the Broadway revival of the classic starring Mary-Louise Parker in the title role “quite stale”.

She was convinced to make this her first Queensland stage performance by director Paige Rattray who directed Cormack in the 2015 Budnic work Boys will be Boys for Sydney Theatre Company.

“When Paige said Melisa was readapting it and that it would be a reimagining of Hedda and contemporised and set on the Gold Coast well, that really excited me.”

Cormack had every reason to be excited. This work is bitingly funny, insightful and shocking – often all at in the same moment.

Rattray says that while Budnic’s adaptation soars it never loses its sense of the original Ibsen.

“It was really interesting seeing the things that felt like the most unbelievable were things from the original text,” she says.

For Rattray, who was Queensland Theatre’s associate artistic director before returning to STC as associate director earlier this year, Ibsen’s Hedda is a rare and great female leading lady.

“I was looking at the great female leads in history and quite often they are woman with no agency who meet a tragic end,” says Rattray. “I am not necessarily interested in staging those kinds of plays. I would rather see plays where woman have agency and drive and purpose, where they are superheroes.”

Cormack’s Hedda has that drive and purpose as well as real menace. Whether she is a hero or anti-hero is up for debate but what is unquestionable is that she is a fierce woman who is in charge of her own destiny.

While comparisons to the Ibsen text are inevitable Cormack is quick to reassure audiences that the play requires no knowledge of the original to be understood, appreciated and enjoyed.

Having said that she admits a quick Google search will add a new layer of appreciation for what Bosnic has done.

"I just urge people to even just Wikipedia it. It will take five minutes but it will really enrich the experience of seeing Hedda,” she laughs. “Yes there might be some spoiler alerts in there but it is well worth it.”

Hedda by Queensland Theatre continues at the Bille Brown Theatre until December 8