Julia by Joanna Murray-Smith, Melbourne Theatre Company (originally produced by Sydney Theatre Company), Season concluded
At the end of Julia, a play about former prime minister Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech, after the rapturous applause had finally faded and the patrons had begun to shuffle out, the woman seated next to my partner and I turned to me and asked, ‘Why were you laughing so much?’ I hedged politely. Nice try, lady, but no—I was not about to confess my true feelings about a Melbourne Theatre Company production to a woman wearing a cape.
Julia follows, loosely, Gillard’s rise to power in the Labor Party. In between the political content, it rapidly cycles through different scenes from Gillard’s younger life: as a kid in suburban Wales listening to her dad wax lyrical about the Six Bells mining disaster, which Murray-Smith’s script positions as the origin story of her drive for justice; as a teen; as a student politician; as Deputy Prime Minister; as Australia’s first female prime minister. In each of these eras, Gillard, played by Justine Clarke, muses on and remembers the misogyny and sexism she endured at the hands of peers, the press and her fellow politicians. She narrates her story in the present tense: ‘I look across the table at the Leader of the Opposition … I’m standing in Kathy and Lyn Pilowsky’s kitchen after school …’ There is one other cast member, Young Woman, played by Jessica Bentley, whose role is deeply strange, even creepy: a kind of stage-hand-cum-shapeshifter who swaps characters throughout. Sometimes these characters are concrete—high school debating partner, personal assistant—and sometimes they are abstractions: at one point, she seems to take on the role of All Women; at another, of Grief. There are a few props, but no real set and minimal costuming. Clarke doesn’t wear a wig until the very end (what’s with this trend of not dressing stage actors up? Is it a funding thing? Are we in a Muji store?). Finally, she dons the red hair for the misogyny speech, recounted almost in full.
Before seeing Julia, I had forgotten the precise circumstances that occasioned the speech back in 2012 and had begun to misremember it as a general denouncement of misogyny (I think, actually, I began to block it out when I heard it mixed into a Beyoncé song at a house party some time circa 2014). I had forgotten that it was addressed directly to Tony Abbott—that she said it while across the table from him during Question Time—and I had forgotten the Peter Slipper affair. Slipper, a long-time associate of Abbott’s and the Speaker of the House, had sent a series of text messages to a male staffer in which he mused about the similarities between mussels and vaginas. Gillard had been cultivating Slipper’s support to win a majority for her election. When the texts were leaked, Abbott seized the opportunity to slimily denounce the ‘vile’ language and, by extension, Gillard. Gillard’s staffers had seen it coming and prepared her a list of Abbott’s most egregious women-hating moments, and she had scribbled some notes (she has said these were illegible to her in the moment), but the rest was visionary—the kind of epic public laceration that you only get to witness once or twice in a lifetime.
I thought it would be hard to pull off the speech: too overdetermined. In fact, it’s the best part of the play. The audience lapped it up. I lapped it up. The one problem with the speech is that its fluency and humour throw into sharp relief the slackness of much of the rest of the script. Earlier in the play, for instance, a cry of ‘The 1980s!’ signals that we have entered the 1980s. Gillard’s narration goes:
Feminism enters the eighties a rebel—giving the finger to the mainstream establishment …
And what’s hotter than a smart good-looking redhead? A smart good-looking redhead who wants things for herself.
I want to change the world, I really do. But also, I’m just… hot.
Leaving aside how embarrassing it is to witness the avatar for a dowdy prime minister flailing around sensually on stage—at one point during this scene she grinds on Young Woman—the problem here is the generality. The eighties! Feminism! The mainstream establishment! Someone who wants things! To change the world! If the point is to evoke a decade of Gillard’s personal-political life, it does this at the expense of anything that could help the audience make sense of Gillard as a specific person. In the same section, the liberal use of ‘fucks’ and slogans like ‘rage is sexy’ imposes a 2010s brand of girlboss feminism onto the era, making it feel altogether too modern, so we get neither specificity nor the vibe of the thing.
Then, from the eighties, we cut to 2007: ‘I am the first female deputy prime minister of Australia. Beat. She smiles. Fuck yes. Beat. Lights change. My boss is… an emotionally volatile Mandarin-speaking intellectual Queenslander. Eyebrow lift at the absurdity’. This gets a big laugh from the audience, as Queenslanders often do in Naarm’s cultural spaces. In My Story, Gillard’s 2014 political autobiography, she writes disparagingly of one of Kevin Rudd’s media tactics of ‘filling the space’: ‘pump so much content into the hands of journalists that bad news about the government or the Opposition’s complaints should be crowded out’. Murray-Smith does something similar in Julia. Justine Clarke whips between—is compelled by the script to whip between—scenes and subplots: Gillard’s childhood on Truro Avenue and her good old dad, Gillard eating a gingersnap in bed, a Lady Macbeth impersonation—and all the while, Young Woman lurks in the background, in sneakers, occasionally stepping forward to smile gently or re-pot some flowers.
Whatever Murray-Smith’s intention here, the frenzy crowds out Gillard’s actual politics. Three-ish paragraphs give the sum of Gillard’s policies on offshore detention centres (she re-opened Manus and Nauru), her opposition to same-sex marriage, her reduction of the Single Parenting Payment—and even these scant mentions are intermingled with naff lamentations about missed family functions. Again and again, the script returns to the misogyny Gillard faced, and—as well as burying Gillard’s less savoury politics—skims past what Gillard herself sees as her big achievements: Fair Work, for instance, which replaced Howard’s WorkChoices. Can one dramatise the 2009 Fair Work Act? I don’t know, but during yet another girlboss flight of fancy, I found myself longing for some dry political machinations. A dramatic scene hinging on base rates would at least do justice to the woman who, contrary to Gillard’s depiction at different points in Julia, was not a Lean In millennial queen, not a hot piece of ass, not a tough old broad who swears like a sailor, but an awkward, calculating, hard-headed nerdwho thought obsessively about policy.
And then there’s the Big Finish. This is mostly why I was laughing. Immediately after the speech, Young Woman materialised and, speaking for the first time in the play, began listing types of women: ‘The woman working in the blast furnace in Kembla. The lawyer in Cottesloe. The girl on the bicycle in Fitzroy. The matron at Port Hedland. The artist in Papunya. The woman in Six Bells…’. I started giggling at ‘blast furnace’ and lost it at ‘bicycle’. Then the large screens flanking the stage suddenly filled with dozens of young girls of many different ethnicities, singing together in harmony like a QANTAS ad. Then, finally, the ghostly outline of a clanging bell, the actors looking startled, possibly tripping: ‘The bells…can you hear them?…I can hear them…I can hear them…’
Do we really need a play in which the best part is a fifteen-minute stretch that wasn’t even written by the playwright but spoken, off the cuff, twelve years ago, by its subject? If the point of the play is to highlight the rigged struggle of being a woman in politics, it’s ironic that Julia the play does exactly what Julia the politician railed against—positions her as woman first, politician second, pandering to a soothingly basic understanding of society in which gender explains all ills and feminism cures them. In her introduction to the print edition of Julia, author Charlotte Wood writes about the day Gillard made the speech. Wood’s inbox and phone started pinging with messages, and—thrilled and enraged—she watched it online. Fired up, she hit the gym and worked out furiously on the stair machine while listening to the speech on repeat in her headphones. Some of us listen to Gaga, but… OK, I kind of get it. The speech is good. It holds up. Why not cut everything but the speech? In fact, why not give the people what they want and play it over and over again on screen, with bottomless Chardonnay for the ladies? Budget version: rewatch the speech on YouTube, read Gillard’s Wikipedia page, and load up a few Mamamia articles from that era. You’ll get the idea.