My Brilliant Career is a joyously angry work – and a new adaptation for the stage by Kendall Feaver is bringing that anger to life. Here before us at Sydney’s Belvoir, so alive and hungry to be heard, is Sybylla Melvyn (Nikki Shiels), the young dreamer with a cloud of strawberry curls and a tempest of moods who wants more from life. She wants to be an artist (a pianist, an actor, a writer), not a wife or a mother. She wants to travel the world – or at least to Sydney – but Sybylla is the eldest daughter of a struggling family in rural New South Wales, where opportunities are few.
The chances are that you already know Sybylla: you might have read My Brilliant Career, the novel published in 1901, or seen Gillian Armstrong’s film from 1979. The work, and its author, Stella Maria Sarah “Miles” Franklin, have left behind a complicated legacy. Franklin was just 16 when she wrote the tumbling, breathless, bold proto-feminist text, and it was not published under a male pseudonym as she had wished (or the title she had wished, with a question mark at the end). Writer and poet Henry Lawson, who submitted the novel to his publishers, revealed Franklin’s secret in a preface he wrote instead. Locals took her writing as a comment on her family and neighbours; the book ended up being pulled from publication until after Franklin’s death.
For better or worse, Franklin casts a long literary shadow: her novel is remembered while other Australian female writers of the time have been long forgotten; her much-celebrated work helps build a collective national fantasy of white Australian history as the dominant narrative; two significant literary awards, the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize, are named in her honour. The reverence for her writing is complicated by the fact that later in life, Franklin was involved with the Australia First movement that sympathised with and supported Nazism. It’s something to grapple with: who are we; who is Franklin to us; what do we want her to represent?
Feaver has followed the thread that still runs tight around our lives: discrimination against women, especially poor women. This is a glittering-sharp script that centres Sybylla’s ambition and her frustrations and makes them timeless. Shiels is a storm of wild romantic adolescence in the role – you can’t take your eyes off her. She’s impatient with her mother (Blazey Best) for marrying her father (Jason Chong), an alcoholic whose choices have disrupted the family’s financial security – her mother is now so busy she has no time for herself.
Sybylla is seduced by the more comfortable life her grandmother (Tracy Mann) offers and even has her head turned by the handsome-as-all-get-out Harry Beecham (Guy Simon). Living with her grandmother expands her world: her bachelor uncle (Chong again) encourages Sybylla to act, play piano and study elocution; she learns from her aunt Helen (Best, again), and Beecham’s own spinster aunt Gussie (Mann again) offers different ways that women have learned to survive. (Tom Conroy and Emma Harvie round out the cast in multiple clever roles.)
And then we hit the second act, where all that expansion proves just a tease. Romance and dreaming are replaced, as they often are when we age, with tough work and tough lessons about how far you can realistically travel in life without money or support.
Feaver’s writing is as ambitious as Sybylla, with sparkling wit and steady emotional build. While the staging (designed by Robert Cousins) and direction (by Kate Champion) keep it all admirably minimal and mutable, you can’t help but wish for a little more richness onstage to support Feaver’s world-building. There are a couple of nearly-magic DIY theatre choices – a sunrise backdrop unravels as Sybylla flirts with the idea of love; Sybylla and Harry’s fall into the river is staged by buckets of water thrown on the pair – but those moments are so few that they don’t resemble an aesthetic approach.
It’s a thread that could have been picked up and carried through to represent Sybylla’s creativity and the paucity of resources (imagine: paper birds, trees built out of rope, objects repurposed as props). There is a lot of floor scrubbing, because there’s nothing else to scrub onstage but chairs and a piano, and it begins to feel repetitive and dull.
So the words are the star here – some are Franklin’s verbatim, others Feaver’s – bold and declarative and rallying.
In the final scene, words eventually give way to silence, and something – not hope, but a moment of peace – is offered; a suggestion of grace in a life that’s been largely unhappy and full of unwanted compromise. Late afternoon sun slates through a window. Sybylla and her mother, for the first time in the whole play, are done with chores. Sybylla writes. Her mother, tentatively, touches her hands to the piano keys and plays. Feaver leaves us with this gift, and perhaps the purest gift we can take from Franklin, whose life and ideas are contradictory, prescient, often unpleasant, audacious: a moment to please the senses, to please the soul, makes it possible to endure even the most exhausting days.
• My Brilliant Career is showing in the Upstairs Theatre at Belvoir until 31 January
