Words by Susie Henderson

Image: still of actress Justine Clarke wearing the iconic Julia Gillard hair style, the director Sarah Goodes and creative team were mindful not to fall into the trope of impersonation but rather built towards a total ‘image’ of Gillard including the iconic bob for a key moment in the production.

The first time I read the script for Julia I knew that designing video for the piece was going to require a delicate touch. The subject matter – the ascension of Julia Gillard, her time in parliament and the events leading up to her famous misogyny speech – occupy an important place in Australia’s collective cultural psyche. Additionally, this was a piece about a real, living woman – something that required more care and sensitivity than most other scripts I had worked with.

We began with a million ideas but over the course of rehearsals they boiled down to a very clear language within the show. Primarily the video design exists within three threads: Nature, Parliament, and the Next Generation. We follow Julia’s relationship with the natural world from her childhood in Wales, through her teenage years, and track her disconnection from it as she gains more power. The parliamentary world is clean, sharp and highly curated, often giving us the sense she is being perceived and recorded.

This unspoken pressure mounts during the show, culminating in a fragmentation of every image we see of Julia throughout the piece.

Image: Green fields represent Gillard’s connection to nature, specifically to her Welsh heritage. Photography by Prudence Upton, 2023.

The practical core of the design is two rear projection screens, sitting upstage of a square of iconic green parliamentary carpet. These screens are angled towards each other and fronted by reflective glass. The set and costume designer of the production, Renee Mulder, crafted a beautifully minimalist physical space.

The glass is a key element of the design, allowing us to blend the cast seamlessly with the projected world. The angle of the screens also creates a parallax effect where the stage multiplies and refracts, giving the illusion of multiple rooms onstage. We hoped the reflective element of the screens would give the illusion Justine’s Julia GIllard and the young woman played by Jessica Bentley were embedded within the projection as well as live onstage, but none of us had worked with an effect like that before. We ran tests to ensure the effect would indeed work and to determine how best to approach lighting the subjects. It quickly became apparent that any direct light on the screens was going to ruin the effect as the glass would pick up anything that was captured by the light. Lighting designer Alex Berlage addressed this brilliantly throughout the production.

One thing we didn’t know, however, was how the two screens angled towards each other would interact because we only had the resources to build one during rehearsals. The good news? It worked perfectly.

At its core this show peels back the many layers of Julia Gillard and investigates what makes her tick, and what led her to make that famous speech in 2012. Justine Clarke slowly reveals elements of Julia through her performance, and the video design – in tandem with the set design by Renee Mulder and lighting design by Alexander Berlage– augment that narrative sense of human complexity within the show, ultimately exposing all aspects of this extremely consequential character.

Image: Projected figures and bodies of the live actors reflected in the glass surfaces downstage of the two rear projection screens. “The glass is a key element of the design, allowing us to blend the cast seamlessly with the projected world. The angle of the screens also creates a parallax effect where the stage multiplies and refracts, giving the illusion of multiple rooms onstage.” – Susie Henderson. Photography by Prudence Upton, 2023.

We open the piece with an empty, sparely lit stage. As we activate sound and lights morphing, a young girl walks on screen, facing up stage. She is followed by Justine Clarke and Jessica Bentley, who plays a younger woman, entering the space. The three of them appear to be in a stalemate. The music ends, the ligths shift and the girl disappears, leaving the audience with an unanswered question – how does a young girl fit into Julia Gillard’s life and legacy?

The piece culminates in Justine’s performance of the infamous “Not Now, Not Ever” speech delivered in parliament in 2012. As we approach the end of the fifteen minute-long evisceration of the then opposition leader Tony Abbott, the screens – which until this point project a barren landscape of parliamentary carpet and drifting fog – start to fill with a choir of young people, beginning with the young girl we meet at the start of the show.

The backlit choir finishes filling the screens at the precise moment the speech ends with the words “ … the Leader of the Opposition should think seriously about the role of women in public life and in Australian society because we are entitled to a better standard than this.” As the play concludes, the children turn towards the audience and the lights on them shift to reveal their faces. They perform a Welsh choral piece (composed by Stephen Francis), and we are left with a hopeful visage of the next generation as the lights fade to black.

The choir encapsulates the third thread of the video design – Julia Gillard’s connection to the next generation of young women who were empowered by her speech. Through her actions, she handed the baton down, and a primary objective was to highlight how this speech – delivered long ago on a Tuesday afternoon in Canberra – still echoes around the country today.

Image: The choir sequence was one of the biggest logistical and design challenges. STC staff participated in a test shoot to determine numbers of children needed and the impact of costumeing, the dimension of the space and angles need to shoot from. Alex Berlage collaborated with Susie on the lighting concept for the choir shoot, for which they hired a massive diffuser to acheive a soft ambient quality used with backlight. 

As a video designer I find that when it comes to theatrical projects I am often contacted fairly late into the process, sometimes as late as rehearsals. The later I’m brought onboard , the harder it is to thoroughly and satisfyingly integrate my design into the show. Video designing for theatre is a delicate business, and my practise is strongly tied to storytelling. I believe video designs should be in service of the production and the story being told, and not necessarily to emphasise aesthetics.

For Julia, I was contacted early in the process and welcomed by a wonderful design team and director who made this a collaborative experience from the get go. I contribute a lot of my success on Julia to this inclusivity. It led to the successful integration of video design into a piece that in many people’s minds didn’t necessitate a video design at all!

The entire creative team deserve my gratitude for their willingness to take a risk.

Image: Susie hard at work with Solomon Thomas at STC.

WRITER : Joanna Murray-Smith

DIRECTOR : Sarah Goodes

VIDEO DESIGNER : Susie Henderson

SET & COSTUME DESIGNER : Renee Mulder

LIGHTING DESIGNER : Alexander Berlage

SOUND DESIGNER & COMPOSER : Steve Francis

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR : Charley Sanders

VOICE COACH : Jennifer White

CAST : Justine Clarke, Jessica Bentley

PRODUCED BY : Sydney Theatre Company, 2023 Season

After a sold out season in 2023, Julia returned to stages in 2024 with a national tour.