Description

'I'm ignited by three small words. I will not.'

It's 9 October, 2012. She's been PM for two years and four months and she's worn down. She's been hounded, slurred, dissected, libelled. She's been violated over and over again by words. Julia Gillard's prime ministership was marred by the Australian media monopoly's inability to step over one thing: that she was a woman. A woman who, as a young aspiring lawyer, was told, 'When you are on your way up, don't forget the flowers that grow on the roadside'. There, in the spotlight of Australia's politics and patriarchy, she encounters thorns of the sharpest, cruellest kind.

Joanna Murray-Smith's Julia peels back the public mask to attend to the private woman; one who harbours compassion, doubt, rage and ambition. A woman compelled not simply by her own voice, but by the voices of a million others speaking to, and with, her.

'The writing teems with wit, desire and tenderness.' —ArtsHub

Biography

Joanna Murray-Smith

JOANNA MURRAY-SMITH’s plays have been produced throughout Australia and all over the world, including Honour, which had a public reading with Meryl Streep and was produced on Broadway in 1998, the National Theatre, London, in 2003, and on the West End with Dame Diana Rigg in 2005. Other plays include Fury; Songs for Nobodies; Switzerland; Pennsylvania Avenue; True Minds; Day One A Hotel, Evening; Rockabye; Ninety; Bombshells; Rapture; Nightfall; Redemption; Love Child; Atlanta; Flame and acclaimed adaptations of Hedda Gabler and Scenes From A Marriage, many of which have been translated into other languages. She has been nominated for and won many awards. Her novels include Truce and Judgement Rock, both published by Penguin Australia, and Sunnyside, published by Penguin Australia and Viking in the UK.