Review: JULIA at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Saturday 17th August 2024.

On a celebrated occasion, Tony Abbott observed that politics and theatre had a lot in common. Julia, Joanna Murray-Smith’s audacious assessment of the life and career of Julia Gillard, is the perfect example. Justine Clarke brings intelligence, insight, and comic timing to the stage.

She is incandescent. Director Sarah Goodes has created, with her, a theatrical marvel.

The first part of the play is astonishingly funny, and Clarke delivers her lines in a way that draws raucous laughter from the packed Playhouse. It’s not just her lines. At one point she skewers an opposition politician, you can guess who, with a simple look of bewilderment and a crooked open mouth. Her energy and her timing are electric. With rapid changes in accent, she charts Gillard’s childhood with Welsh parents, her life in Adelaide, and her ascent to Parliament. The Labor party had been led by Mark Latham, and then by Kevin Rudd, whom she describes as a hand grenade, a liability to the party and the country. Toppling him midterm is seen as a duty. She became, on June 24th 2010, the Prime Minister and, after calling an election which she won narrowly, she led a hung parliament.

This is when the laughter stops. Murray-Smith has carefully compiled an indictment against the Liberal party, the Murdoch media, and Alan Jones. Abbott, standing beside a placard stating ‘Ditch the Witch’, the Liberal National Party fundraising dinner of Julia’s ‘small breasts, huge thighs, and a bright red box’, and anything and everything trolled by Jones, are the most egregious moments. The audience is primed, almost from the lights up on the Playhouse stage, for her most memorable speech.

Most people have forgotten Peter Slipper, a renegade Liberal who became speaker of the house. Destroying him would weaken Gillard’s slender grasp on power. Stupidly, he sent an email to James Ashby of such an offensive and juvenile nature that Ashby was quick to make it public. Gillard stood by the speaker amid calls for him to resign and, when accused of sexism by Tony Abbott, she turned on him and the Liberal Party. ‘Thank you very much, Deputy Speaker, and I rise to oppose the motion by the leader of the opposition, and in so doing I say to the leader of the opposition I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny, not now, not ever.’

This is the moment the theatre has been waiting for. They have committed these words to memory, and you can see them mouthing along with Justine Clarke’s brilliant exposition. ‘The Leader of the Opposition says that people who hold sexist views and are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs’. Just typing out those words is so profoundly satisfying.

James Ashby’s accusations of sexual harassment by Slipper were later dismissed, described by a Judge as being used ‘for the predominant purpose of causing significant public reputational and political damage to Mr Slipper.’ Where are these men now? Who cares?

Clarke is not alone on stage. Jessica Bentley is her silent companion, helping her on and off with her jackets and, most importantly, tending the small bunch of flowers, enigmatic and delicate. It’s a reference to something John Gillard said about keeping an eye on the flowers by the side of the road as you journey towards the future.

The opening night audience was ecstatic. At least one female senator was there, many Labor Party members, tanked-up champagne socialists, and theatre lovers. How audiences not so politically savvy will respond, who knows, but Justine Clarke’s world-class performance is unforgettable.

Photography, Prudence Upton.