The Aussie screen legend making an ‘electrifying’ stage comeback

After a 14-year absence, Judy Davis is returning to the Australian stage at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre next year.

The three-time Emmy Award-winner, acclaimed for her role as Judy Garland on the small screen, has been coaxed from film and television projects to star in Australia’s first stage adaptation of Helen Garner’s novel The Spare Room.

Judy Davis and Liz Alexander in The Spare Room. Credit: Belvoir St Theatre

Davis was last seen on stage in 2011 in Belvoir Street’s The Seagull. She directed husband Colin Friels in the company’s production of Dance of Death six years ago. Friels and the couple’s daughter, Charlotte, will also join Belvoir’s 2025 season for a reboot of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

“It’s very special to have Judy back on stage,” Belvoir’s artistic director Eamon Flack said. “I think she is an electrifying actor and an electrifying storyteller who is born to play this role.”

The Garner adaptation is among nine plays, including four premieres, to be showcased next year by the company, whose Surry Hills premises have recently been transformed courtesy of a $2 million renovation.

Flack said Belvoir’s upcoming season was “full of heroism and feats of daring. It is ever-changing and full of unexpectedness and happy accidents”.

The company was helped to a thin surplus of $27,000 last calendar year off a strong box office that surpassed $4 million for the first time since 2019.

It’s hoping for an opening-season hit with Jacky, which comes to Sydney after a critically-acclaimed run with the Melbourne Theatre Company. It’s the story of a young Indigenous man caught between his brother, a secret side hustle and a white patron.

Dalara Williams also pens and stars in Big Girls Don’t Cry, a new work set amid preparations for a deb ball in Redfern in 1966. Another season centrepiece will be a new play, The Wrong Gods, from S. Shakthidharan – co-creator with Flack of Counting and Cracking, coincidentally making its New York debut this week. This work shifts from Sri Lanka to India to tell the story of a mother-and-daughter struggle.

In The Spare Room, Garner explores the complex friendship between two women — one dying, the other who opens her home to care for her while her friend undergoes alternative cancer therapy. The story draws heavily on Garner’s own experience nursing a friend dying from cancer. It’s also separately being made into an opera.

From the writer of Counting and Cracking, The Wrong Gods tells the story of a mother-and-daughter struggle. Credit: Belvoir Street Theatre

Davis plays the carer, Helen, alongside Liz Alexander in the tragi-comedy directed by Flack. “It’s a book about honesty and rage, and women are taught to [express] neither of those things,” Flack said.

Flack and Davis are friends. He has leant on the actor for support during his nine years as artistic director “because of her understanding of what acting is, inspiring and unsurpassed in some way”.

“So when I asked her to do this, and she said ‘yes’, I felt really gratified,” he said. “She’s like a dream to work with ... she’s so good.”

Flack has also cast Friels as the titular character in The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters for his emotional commitment and raw power: “He is an actor with a thumping heart. He has an unsurpassed ability with heightened text and raw power. He is the perfect King Lear. ”

Lear was a play for modern ages, Flack said: “It’s about how we pass on our kingdoms, it’s about the natural world revenging itself on our hubris. It’s about what happens when an old regime holds on for too long. It’s about what happens when a new regime isn’t ready or begins to tear itself apart. The extremity of beauty, of love and total uncertainty that the play cuts itself from is miraculous. I feel ready as a director.”

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