Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes and The Twilight Saga’s Xavier Samuel will tread the boards in Adelaide as part of the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s 2014 season.

They are among a number of casting coups for the company in a program that will include four world premieres, several new Australian works, and three “reinvigorated classics”.

“We’re staying really concentrated on the Australian voice, whether that’s new Australian plays or Australian takes on classic repertoire, and being less dependent on contemporary international writing,” artistic director Geordie Brookman told InDaily ahead of today’s season launch.

British-born Margolyes, who played Professor Sprout in the Potter films and was last in Adelaide with her one-woman stage show Dickens’ Women, will star in young Australian playwright Lally Katz’s comedy Neighbourhood Watch at the Dunstan Playhouse in May. Described as an “odd-couple tale”, the play centres on the surprising friendship between an 80-year-old Hungarian widow and a scatter-brained aspiring actress.

Samuel (below), who is from Adelaide and found fame in Hollywood with his role in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, will return home to play Konstantin in an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull by Australian Hilary Bell.

“He’s the most fast-tracked young Hollywood leading man that we’ve had come out of Adelaide in a long, long time,” Brookman says.

“Getting someone who’s in that kind of major film world to just step out of it for three months  – it’s quite a coup.”

The play will be presented in association with the Adelaide Festival in the intimate setting of the State Theatre Company’s scenic workshop.

“If there’s a single idea that the season hangs around, it’s the idea of community – the human need for connection and love,” Brookman says “The Seagull is like a tribute to the idea of unrequited love; it’s what makes it so funny but also so desperately sad.”

After a couple of lacklustre years, the company has recorded growth in subscriptions (up 10 per cent) and audience numbers (up more than 30 per cent) in 2013, with the current production, Brief Encounter, on track to be the highest-grossing show in its history.

“We feel like we’ve got some momentum, which is wonderful,” says Brookman, who took up his position last year.

“But with that momentum, we didn’t want to rest on our laurels … we want to make sure next year is the next step in terms of our ambitions for the company and the scale we want it to be working at.”

Other classics in the 2014 line-up include Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, with Nancye Hayes as Lady Bracknell and Nathan O’Keefe as the young bachelor Algernon, and the Shakespearean tragedy Othello, which will be brought into a contemporary Australian military setting by Adelaide director Nescha Jelk and will star Hazem Shammas and Renato Musolino (the Dromio twins in this year’s The Comedy of Errors).

Premiering in June 2014 at Her Majesty’s Theatre will be Little Bird, a work commissioned from Nicki Bloom especially for actor and singer Paul Capsis. The first collaboration between State Theatre and the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the one-man play is described as a “dark fairytale” about a young man’s startling transformation, and will be accompanied by music from composer Quentin Grant and former member of The Audreys Cameron Goodall.

Rounding out the main-stage program is influential director Peter Brook’s The Suit, a play about adultery and betrayal set in 1950s South Africa, and a new co-production with Sydney Theatre Company called Kryptonite.

Brookman says Kryptonite, by Sue Smith (Mabo, Bastard Boys, Brides of Christ), is set from 1988-2013 and centres on a carefree Sydney student and an introverted Chinese exchange student whose lives become intertwined after they meet at university just before the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“It’s like the greatest love story that never quite happens. They should be together but this world of cultural difference keeps them apart.

“It’s also like a tight political thriller. She becomes an executive in China and he becomes a federal Greens politician … the world of mining industry politics gets pulled into this personal relationship.

“It’s like she [Smith] has taken the Australia-China relationship, boiled it down to two people, and created a play around it.”

Also exploring topical issues are next year’s State Umbrella project Between Two Waves, which looks at the challenges of climate change; the Education Program commission Jesikah, about on a schoolgirl obsessed with the idea of achieving YouTube fame, and the joint Sydney Theatre Company and Australian Department of Defence production The Long Way Home, which explores the experiences of servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor and marks the centenary of the beginning of World War I.