‘A Model Murder’: the 1954 trial that gripped Sydney takes to the stage

Audiences for A Model Murder can buy tickets to sit in the public gallery or in the jury box … playwright and director Sheridan Harbridge and actor Sofia Nolan. Photograph: Jessica Hromas

In 1954, when the 22-year-old Sydney model Shirley Beiger went on trial for the alleged murder of her live-in lover, hundreds of spectators, many of them women, queued outside Darlinghurst’s courthouse with sandwiches, Thermos flasks and even babies, hoping for a seat.

“They were yelling, ‘God bless you, Shirl,’” says the award-winning theatre maker Sheridan Harbridge. “They were fully behind her and what she’d done.”