Justine Clarke to star as Julia Gillard in new play for Sydney Theatre Company

Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith has written a dramatised portrait of Australia’s first female prime minister in the lead-up to the misogyny speech.

‘Challenged in a good way’: Justine Clarke will play Julia Gillard on stage in a one-woman show about Australia’s first female prime minister. Picture: John Feder

Julia Gillard’s emotionally charged counter-attack on her critics in the misogyny speech of October 2012 has inspired a dramatised portrait of Australia’s first female prime minister by one of our best-known playwrights.

Joanna Murray-Smith has written a one-woman play, Julia, that tries to get inside Gillard’s head and understand the psychological pressures that finally led her to make the passionate speech that ricocheted around the world.

Justine Clarke will portray Gillard in the play, a co-production of the Sydney Theatre Company and Canberra Theatre Centre that will open in March next year.

Murray-Smith said she was motivated to write the fictionalised portrait of Gillard because she could not understand why the then prime minister did not present a warmer personality to the electorate.

“As a playwright, you are always trying to forensically explore the psychology of your characters, and there is something about her I think was un­usually unavailable to the public,” she said. “No one quite knew who she was, including me.”

Murray-Smith said she approached Gillard’s office before she started work on the play and eventually had a long conversation with her. “I had imagined, when talking to her, that she would be extremely defensive and very careful in what she said,” Murray-Smith said. “The truth was far from that. She was extremely open and generous.”

In the play, Murray-Smith used the words of other real-life people but Gillard’s dialogue was all “fictional, hypothesised, my imagining”. She wanted to avoid the more obvious scenario of a parliamentary drama with “political bit-players” stalking the corridors of power.

Clarke said she was “challenged in a good way” by the prospect of playing Gillard on stage, especially given the political and cultural impact of Australia’s first female prime minister.

“There is no doubt that her speech and the global attention it brought changed the course of conversation,” she said.

Julia is part of STC’s 2023 season, announced by artistic director Kip Williams on Thursday. The season of 16 plays has 10 by Australian writers, including a stage version of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and The Poison of Poly­gamy, based on a 1909 novel by Chinese-Australian writer Wong Shee Ping.

Murray-Smith said she had not written a hagiography of Gillard or an analysis of her prime ministership, but had tried to understand the woman behind the politician. “It’s the psychology – the growing awareness in her of what she was up against, in terms of gender issues, in terms of the national culture and how it viewed women,” she said.