Joanna Murray Smith says audiences will hear Julia Gillard’s famed “misogyny speech” differently after watching Julia. Photo: Supplied.
When playwright Joanna Murray Smith considered creating Julia for Sydney Theatre Company, she contacted Australia’s first (and so far only) female Prime Minister and gave her an out.
“I was conscious of the fact she’d been subjected to so much humiliation and distress, and I didn’t want to add to that,” she said.
“I wrote to her that I had been offered the opportunity and would like to do it, but was happy not to. I told her, ‘Feel free to tell me not to’.
“Her people came back to me and said she was happy for me to write the play and that I could do whatever I liked.”
Following a sell-out, critically acclaimed premiere season in 2023 and a smash-hit national tour in 2024, the political drama Julia is now set to burst onto the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre stage for a two-week season this week.
Julia explores the life and legacy of Julia Gillard, one of Australia’s most unforgettable leaders.
A major highlight is Justine Clarke’s extraordinary portrayal, which culminates in an electrifying verbatim performance of Gillard’s famed “misogyny speech”.
But as important as the speech itself was, the play offers a stirring glimpse behind the public persona, exploring the challenges and triumphs of women in contemporary politics.
“I was intrigued that everything written about her had been faithfully engaged with what she’d done and the chronology of her leadership, but very little delved into her psyche,” Murray Smith says.
“None of us knew who she was. That’s a gap, as a playwright, I could fill in — with her approval.”
Justine Clarke expertly inhabits the role of Australia’s first female Prime Minister in Julia. Photo: Sydney Theatre Company.
Due to this drought of personal insight into the former prime minister, Murray Smith would not create the play without interviewing the woman herself. She eventually “wore her down” and scored a couple of hours, which she carefully prepared for.
“My priority was to get a sense of the woman and that was fantastic. She was so warm and funny and quite open,” she says.
“What she wasn’t – and this was intriguing – interested in was navel gazing or reassessing herself with the benefit of hindsight, or with shaping the narrative around herself.
“She’s both idealistic and a pragmatist, which means she doesn’t want to talk or think very much about the past, she wants to get on with the future.
“I became really motivated to give the audience an opportunity to reassess her and their response to what she went through, just as I had. But also to explore the idea of what it was like to be a female political leader and the nature of the national culture at the time she was PM.”
Murray Smith says the misogyny speech, delivered a decade later and following a probe into Gillard’s psychology, takes on new meaning.
“She didn’t want to be an ’emotional’ leader because she didn’t want to play into the misogynistic tropes of the critics who wanted to indicate she was not adequately qualified for the job, when of course she was,” she says.
“She didn’t want to talk about sexism, or being a woman; she just wanted to be seen as a leader. But in national culture, that was impossible. Every aspect of her leadership was filtered through that lens.
“As you watch the play, you feel the growing suspense of a woman subjected to more than most could handle; it’s like you’re experiencing the fault lines leading up to that moment when, finally, one small comment from Tony Abbott becomes the ignition for the explosion.
“I say explosion because it was so deeply felt and went viral around the world as a piece of spontaneous rhetoric.
“She didn’t cry, or scream, but it was so savage and astute and brilliantly composed and it really became the ultimate statement about how contemporary culture treats women in leadership roles.”
Julia runs from Wednesday 3 to Saturday 13 September at the IPAC, Burelli Street Wollongong. Tickets range from $84 to $119.
