Within the first 10 minutes of My Brilliant Career, Netflix’s new adaptation of the classic Australian novel by Miles Franklin, there’s smutty performance poetry and a Divinyls needle drop that suggests it’s not going to be your standard turn-of-the-century period drama. By the end of the first episode – in which our teen heroine, Sybylla Melvin, pops a squat for a bush wee and flashes her knickers at a drawing room full of toffs while dancing to a Rod Stewart cover – you sense that anything could happen. And yet somehow, the alfresco fingerbang later in the series still surprises.
“It’s bonkers,” admits the show’s star Philippa Northeast, who plays Sybylla. “You really see this world through a teenage lens – which is true to Sybylla’s spirit and Miles’ age at the time she wrote the book … it reads like a teenager’s diary entry, pretty much.”
