On 9 October 2012, the then prime minister Julia Gillard delivered what is now known as the “misogyny speech” in parliament. A feat of rhetoric and a viral sensation – “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man … Not now, not ever” – it burned into the Australian consciousness. For a moment, it felt like it might herald a social and political shift towards gender equity, not just in numbers, but in spirit.
Also in 2012, the Australia Council released its Women in Theatre report, detailing an imbalance in the arts: in the decade prior, women accounted for about 16% of playwrights performed in the country each year. The numbers were even lower for female directors.
Julia, the new play by Joanna Murray-Smith, commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams, is a direct result of both events. It asks, how did we arrive at the misogyny speech? And what might Gillard have been feeling in those minutes, weeks, months before she changed her story by delivering it?
One of the most produced Australian playwrights internationally, Murray-Smith’s work often centres the inner lives of women and their tension with the people and societies around them; 2014’s Switzerland (directed by Sarah Goodes, who also directs Julia), about author Patricia Highsmith, is now being adapted for film, starring Helen Mirren. Blending heightened poetic language with no-nonsense colloquialisms, Murray-Smith is a considered and thoughtful writer who carves out story beats with a clear sense of their rhythm. Her plays move.
It isn’t surprising, then, that Julia is an excellent example of the contemporary feminist biography. But it only tells part of the former prime minister’s story. While Murray-Smith didn’t intend the work to be a hagiography, decisions Gillard made which complicated her progressive legacy are barely engaged with here. Instead, the work celebrates a particular strain of feminism that overwhelmingly prioritises white and privileged women, and fights to give them more power.
Goodes shapes the piece with insight and care, offering an expansive view of Gillard as woman, not caricature – and Justine Clarke resists impersonation in the title role. Slowly over the course of the play, her costume becomes more and more buttoned-up; a flannel is traded for a blouse, then a blazer, then a Gillard jacket. Gillard’s strong accent is deployed sparingly, in emphasis and direct speech only; it achieves a separation between who she is as a person and who she is in public.
Like Sydney Theatre Company’s 2022 work about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RBG, Julia is largely a solo piece, myth-making the very recent sociopolitical past. Like Belvoir St theatre’s 2020 adaptation of A Room of One’s Own, a silent, reproachful woman watches the action, acting as our conscience – played here by Jessica Bentley, a woman of colour, this character (billed as “Young Woman”) represents those who were disappointed by some of Gillard’s policies. And like Kendall Feaver’s 2020 adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, Julia blends the fictional script with historical record to paint a more robust picture of a woman and her inner life.
The play meticulously details the media and political response to Gillard’s appointment as prime minister. It offers real and discomfiting examples of disrespect – the commentary around her outfits, the speculation on her worth as a childfree woman, the gendered insults in the media and at political events. Murray-Smith’s Julia, played with astonishing restraint by Clarke, acknowledges that other women have and do suffer more from misogyny, but highlights the sexist treatment that makes her worthy of our sympathy. We might pat ourselves on the back for electing a woman prime minister, but our popular culture and news media turned her into a joke.
This type of story is a popular one to tell, because it has clear heroes and villains. But Gillard’s story is more complicated than that: she made real and damaging decisions that impacted other women too. Murray-Smith’s script does gesture briefly at these, with a handful of words noting her refusal to back marriage equality, and her cut to single parent payments – a move which disproportionately impacted vulnerable women. That payment cut occurred on the same day as the famous speech – an uncomfortable fact that this play overlooks.
In this same short section of the play, which only lasts a few moments, Gillard also explains why she chose to resume offshore processing of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. Murray-Smith’s Gillard describes this as a difficult decision made in response to chaos, and she stumbles with emotion when she talks about refugee babies who drowned while being smuggled across the seas. But she doesn’t speak of the enormous loss of life and personhood in these inhumane detention centres.
The play’s version of Gillard is justifying her most controversial policies – but without reckoning with the consequences of those policies, it feels like the play is justifying them too.
Julia builds up to the speech itself, which Clarke eventually, electrifyingly, delivers in full: Gillard, the play suggests, is finally her most complete self. The audience is clearly eager for it – this is a speech we’ve lovingly remixed, printed on candles and committed to lip-sync memory – and Clarke breathes new life into it.
But the play’s central thesis – that Gillard was harmed by sexism and confronted it meaningfully with this speech – leaves no room for the nuances. And it feels like a missed opportunity. If you can choose to have a woman of colour registering her disappointment from the sidelines, for instance, why not also give her some lines about it, and give airtime to a different perspective? Instead, when the Young Woman finally does speak, it is with reverence, to indicate that the misogyny speech reached everyday women and promised them change.
And so the audience is left to applaud both the former prime minister and a limited vision of her story: about a woman climbing the male-dominated power ladder against the odds. In the end Julia is just as political as Gillard’s career: it chooses, carefully, what we remember, and how we reckon with it.
Julia runs at the Sydney Opera House until 20 May
