THEATRE Julia ★★★ By Joanna Murray-Smith, Melbourne Theatre Company, until July 13 It’s good to see Joanna Murray-Smith – a playwright whose feminism has always gone hand in hand with unsparing wit – tackling the life and legacy of Julia Gillard, our first female prime minister. To say there’s a whiff of hagiography about this one-woman show is to admit what may be inevitable when you make theatre about someone who’s still alive. It’s worth seeing this show just to watch Justine Clarke transform into Julia Gillard Credit: Prudence Upton And yet Murray-Smith’s irreverent humour gently clips the wings of fulsome praise, grounding her play in the conflict between idealism and pragmatism, the grim compromises involved in winning, keeping and exercising power, and, yes, the impact of gender on the way Gillard’s political life was read and reported.
How gender influenced Gillard’s prime ministership was provisionally answered in the PM’s own resignation speech. “It doesn’t explain everything,” she said. “It doesn’t explain nothing; it explains some things, and it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey.
” Sophisticated isn’t the word for the merry-go-round of male prime ministers we’ve had since Gillard – none of whom came close to matching the scale of her legislative achievement – despite her “misogyny speech” echoing around the world. This production of Julia has a strength for every weakness. .