Released a decade later, Ted Kotcheff's film became an art house classic, much lauded by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Legend has it that when it was first screened people were outraged; someone reportedly stood up and said "That's not us!"

Australian writer Peter Temple, in his introduction to the re-released novel in 2001, said it "probably set back Australian tourism 20 years"; Robert Drewe said it was "Australia without the sugar-coating".

Writer/director Declan Greene says Wake in Fright is one of his all-time favourite novels – and one that stands the test of time. The Malthouse's artist in residence says he wanted to be true to the spirit of the original and to try to anticipate the author's intentions. There's much rich material to be gleaned from the book.

"If you look at the town of Bundanyabba as a microcosm for Australia in general, I think it becomes a story about how Australia treats outsiders," he says. "What the hospitality to people who aren't from Australia is like, and also it can become a story of assimilation as well. What Australians expects outsiders to give up and accept and take on; what we expect of our guests in this country."

Greene says the novel – and his adaptation – is deeply relevant to current day political issues. For him, it speaks to how we treat refugees and feeds into the broader discussion about what it is to be Australian.

To write the play, he eschewed the film, instead re-reading the book and picking out critical moments and key images. Kenneth Cook's novel has a very strong narrative pull, he says.

"It's very economical, it wastes no time, but then there are also moments of exquisite poetry – the sky, the nature of the landscape and the visceral murdering of the kangaroos. It takes your breath away the writing is so beautiful."

It's the night out roo shooting that most people recall most vividly. Greene says it perplexed international audiences; people were horrified about the idea of kangaroos being massacred, in part because they're a symbol of Australia. Many were equally horrified that we would eat the animal that adorns our national crest, and that we would cull them.

Remarkably, he has adapted the book as a one-person show, starring Zahra Newman as John Grant – and every other character, including the narrator. That said, Greene thinks of it almost as a three- person show. "The other two people are the members of the band friendships. [It's] almost a duet between a live performer and this incredibly detailed sound design that stands in for the town Bundanyabba."

The town itself and the surrounding landscape are surrogate characters in the novel, written about sparely but poetically. That being impossible to replicate onstage, Greene asked Nick Brown and Misha Grace of the duo friendships to create a soundtrack and the visuals to accompany the performance.

"You don't have a hope of representing that, at all – that vastness, that space, and that heat and what that does to a human being. It feels like they're at the edge of something. We haven't tried to do that, we're working on a very empty stage," he says. "It's a very abstract take on that wide open place and that crushing pressure and the madness that arises out of that prolonged discomfort and search for release."

Greene was listening to the friendships album Nullabor 1988-99 and it occurred to him they, alongside Newman, would be ideal collaborators for the project.

"Even though the genre of friendships' music is very hard to classify, it's somewhere between drum and bass and jungle and very aggressive techno. It doesn't sound anything like what you would imagine Australian might sound like, but it does have a really Australian identity to it."

I'd always written plays for myself because no one else would cast me.

Greene was excited about trying to make a radically new version of the story. "Getting [friendships] to build the world of the Yabba, and also getting Zahra as well, and giving the challenge of making this whole thing to one extraordinary performer became a key part of that."

Masculinity is a clear theme throughout the book. Bundanyabba is populated by the archetypal Australian, which makes the casting of Newman even more interesting.

"There's a very particular type of Australian man who populates Wake in Fright," says Greene, pointing out that there's only one female character in the book. "That type of man is another iteration of a very particular type of Australian larrikin figure, who's descended from the bushranger, translated through the idea of the digger – the Aussie bloke who is cynical, hard-drinking, loves his mates, spits back to authority, is really knockabout and not pressured about anything."

He argues that even if that idea of masculinity has shifted, it is still recognisable. "Even though that type of male is up for question a lot in Australia in 2019, it was also up for questioning in [the book], even though it was written decades ago."

So, what drew him to being a playwright? "Being a bad actor. I was all totally set on making a career as an actor but then I saw myself on screen and thought 'Arggh, no'," he says with a laugh. "I'd always written plays for myself because no one else would cast me. That may have been my first sign that something was wrong."

"What I do with nearly everything I write, the script was developed slowly, it comes out in fits and bursts, a scene here and a scene there, some text not sure where that goes but…"

Once the script was nearly complete, Greene, Newman and Brown from friendships "messed around in a room and tested things" in a two -week development workshop. Greene wrote a lot more material and the show slowly came together.

Greene's last stage adaptation was of the Lars Von Trier film Melancholia - a divisive film, he says. The pressure is much greater with Wake in Fright because it is almost universally loved. "It's one of the great pieces of gothic Australian literature. You do feel a sense of responsibility carrying that.

"We're trying to create something that's really satirical, really funny. As to whether or not it's bleak, that will be in the eye of the beholder. But it's going to be a pretty fun and wild experience."

Wake in Fright is at the Malthouse from June 21- July 14.

malthousetheatre.com.au