JULIA at Arts Centre Melbourne: A Portrait in Power, Painted in Silence and Flame Through The Julia Gillard speech

Some performances crash like thunder. Others arrive like a hush before the storm. JULIA, Joanna Murray-Smith’s hauntingly lyrical ode to Australia’s first female Prime Minister, does both—and then dissolves into something stranger. Less theatre, more installation. Less political biography, more intimate gallery of human defiance. It opens with a call from childhood: an eight-year-old Julia telling her mother, “I don’t want children, I want to think.” And it culminates in the speech that scorched itself into the national psyche, The Julia Gillard Speech: “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now. Not ever.” Between those two lines—between the girl who wanted to think and the woman who dared to speak—JULIA paints a portrait. Not of perfection, but of resistance in motion. And so, the portrait begins.

Source: Arts Centre

Watching JULIA at Arts Centre Melbourne is like standing inside a portrait as it’s being painted in real time. Brushstroke by brushstroke, the familiar face of Julia Gillard emerges—not as a historical figure, but as an emotional landscape. This isn’t just a play about politics. It is an artwork in motion. A collage of memory, myth, and ferocious stillness. With a metaphorical empty fruit bowl lingering in the background—still absurdly, still powerfully—a symbol of the judgment women are measured against: do we nurture? Do we provide? And if we don’t, are we still good?

The stage is minimalist. Clean. Glass and light. As if the world has been reduced to the bare bones of a museum vitrine—and Julia Gillard is the exhibit, eternally under scrutiny. Renée Mulder’s set design feels clinical and tender at once: a space that could be a parliament, a waiting room, a dressing room, or a cage. And maybe it’s all of those things. At one point it became the green flowering landscape, all through the magic of light.

Source: Arts Centre

Sarah Goodes directs with precision. She doesn’t rush Julia’s transformation—from girl to woman, from idealist to realist, from newcomer to Prime Minister. Instead, it unfolds gradually, like watching an image sharpen through the F-stop of a camera lens. Shirts become jackets. Blouses button higher. Voice hardens. The girl who didn’t want children becomes the woman who governs a nation.

At one point, we’re transported back to Barry, the small Welsh town of Gillard’s childhood—a town that lost 116 children and 28 adults in a single day. The memory is quiet, but devastating. It lingers. Like so much in JULIA, it’s less about what is said and more about what echoes.

Steve Francis’ composition is not a soundtrack—it’s a pulse. The score begins like a breath in the dark, a low heartbeat that grows as the story builds. Sometimes it vanishes completely. Those silences are not absences. They are spaces. Cavities. They ache. They are as vital to the architecture of the play as any spoken line. Then, like a jolt, INXS’s Don’t Change pierces the stillness. “I’m standing here on the ground…” blasts through the theatre—and through my chest. Goosebumps. It’s a song of defiance and belonging, decontextualised here as anthem and echo.

Susie Henderson’s video work adds another spectral layer. Images ghost across transparent walls like digital graffiti, which clearly I was immersed in due to my love in that area. It was not decoration, but context as most graffiti works are. It was a reminder that Gillard’s time in power was shaped not only by what she did, but by the voyeurism of a media and public who felt entitled to her every breath, hemline, and pause.

Together, sound, image, and light create a world that is strangely abstract. Not quite real. Not quite remembered. It’s as though we are inside Gillard’s memory of her own life—fragmented, stylised, and utterly exposed.

In the role of Julia, Justine Clarke doesn’t impersonate—she inhabits. There is no caricature here. No mimicry. Instead, she paints Gillard with a palette of nuance: steel, weariness, idealism, wit. Her voice is her own, shouting out ‘the future has the duty to be more than the past’ in her feminism rebel era of the 80’s as a self claimed smart good-looking redhead-but also just hot. Until suddenly it isn’t—until Gillard’s voice arrives, pointed and unmistakable, and the lines of past and present, character and performer, dissolve.

Clarke’s restraint is her power. She holds the stage like a still photograph holds emotion—a single glance, a clenched jaw, a turned back. It is an astonishing performance, not just because of its range, but because of its refusal to explain. She lets us sit in the ambiguity. The pain and pride. The cost.

And when the speech arrives—the misogyny speech—it is not a crescendo. It is a reckoning held in the body. It is not theatrical. It is elemental. It does not feel like watching a scene. It feels like standing in front of an open flame that has suddenly and finally been given the oxygen it needs to be whole and true again. 

Jessica Bentley’s role as the Young Woman is quiet. Almost spectral. She watches, listens, absorbs. She is not given many words—but her silence is just as loud as her narration is. She exists in the margins. In the shadows of history. A reminder that Gillard’s legacy, like any work of art, casts different shadows depending on where you stand.

Her presence raises uncomfortable questions. About inclusion. About who is centred and who is not. Her silence is a curatorial choice. One that forces the audience to ask: whose stories are framed? And who stands just outside the frame?

JULIA is not a documentary. It is a poem in three dimensions, a feminist portrait not only in subject matter, but in form. In its refusal to conform, we see echoes of Gillard’s own refusal to become a man in pantyhose and pumps. It insists on multiplicity: that there is no fixed structure of what makes a woman a woman. The fruit bowl is not the symbol of her worth. And it celebrates contradiction—reminding us that the power of a voice is shaped not just by what is said, but by who dares to say it.

Murray-Smith’s script does not aim to canonise. It dares to wonder. It chooses rhythm over rhetoric. It glides from memory to myth, from the barren fruit bowl to the blistering parliament floor, from hope to heartbreak without ever anchoring us too tightly. This is storytelling as texture, not timeline.

The result is a play that breathes like a living archive. Not everything is explained. Not everything is resolved. And that is its genius.

Julia Gillard passed more legislation during her tenure than many of her predecessors—even while leading a hung parliament. But that doesn’t mean every decision was good, or without harm. Nor should it. Leadership is not sainthood. Like any rational person, I didn’t agree with all of her policies. And I shouldn't have to. Politics is not a cult. It’s a conversation. And art like JULIA reminds us that we can hold both truth and contradiction in the same breath.

Source: Arts Centre

However, I did enjoy the performance.

JULIA speaks in the language of Silver Moth—shadow and light, memory and fire, truth and its distortions. It is a study in how women are seen, constructed, undone, and reborn. It is not simply about a woman in power. It is about what it means to create yourself in the face of constant unmaking.

As an artist, this play feels like an installation of rage and restraint. A performance that operates like a lens: refracting power, bending light across history, illuminating the beauty and the violence of becoming visible.

It reminds us that art is not escape. For artists like me—who create in rage, who shape the unspeakable into something tangible—art is confrontation. And sometimes, the most radical act is simply to speak the truth out loud—in Parliament, on stage, or in our own skin.

— The Silver Moth