An adaptation of Helen Garner’s award-winning novel The Spare Room will debut at Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre in 2025, starring Judy Davis as a fictionalised version of the author in her first on stage role in almost 15 years.
The announcement caps a banner year for Garner’s work on stage, with an operatic adaptation of The Spare Room in development with the Melbourne company Monstrous Theatre, as well as a remount of the 2008 opera The Children’s Bach.
The Spare Room, released in 2009, is the story of a woman named Helen grappling with rage while caring for a beloved friend with terminal cancer. Belvoir’s artistic director, Eamon Flack, described Davis as “an electrifying actor and storyteller who was born to play this role”.
The production is one of three literary adaptations premiering in Belvoir’s upcoming season, alongside Max Porter’s bestselling novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, co-starring the actor Toby Schmitz, who adapted it with the director Simon Phillips and the lighting designer Nick Schlieper; and Virginia Woolf’s queer classic Orlando, adapted by Belvoir’s resident director, Carissa Licciardello, and the transgender artist Elsie Yager.
Flack, who will adapt The Spare Room, described it as “a book about honesty and rage, and how women are taught not to be either of those things, and what happens when they need to be”. It was divisive when it was published, simultaneously praised and criticised for its raw depiction of a carer’s rage.
“It’s also an extremely funny novel,” Flack said. “When I said to Helen, ‘I think it’s really funny,’ she said, ‘So do I!’ And she said, ‘I don’t understand – so many people got angry at me for being angry.’”
The Spare Room headlines a 2025 Belvoir season that is big on new Australian work, with premieres of plays by S Shakthidharan, whose award-winning Counting and Cracking opened in New York this month after a sold-out return season at Sydney’s Carriageworks in July; the veteran stage and screen writer Andrew Bovell (Lantana; When the Rain Stops Falling); and the Gumbaynggirr/Wiradjuri writer and actor Dalara Williams, whose Big Girls Don’t Cry will be a tribute to her grandmother and aunties, and the Aboriginal debutante balls of 60s Redfern.
Williams’ play is one of two First Nations works in the season, along with the Arrernte writer Declan Furber Gillick’s sharp, dark comedy Jacky, starring Guy Simon as a country boy turned city slicker dabbling in sex work. Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2023 production of Jacky will open at Belvoir in January as part of Blak Out, Sydney festival’s First Nations program. A concurrent program titled Redfern Renaissance will feature a series of panels, workshops and performances celebrating the history of the National Black Theatre in 70s Redfern.
Closing out the year is Flack’s production of The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters, drawing on the original folio version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and starring Colin Friels alongside his daughter, the actor Charlotte Friels.
Meanwhile, a comedic cabaret take on Hans Christian Andersen’s macabre fairytale The Red Shoes, by Australian alt-cabaret performer Meow Meow, may bring a different kind of audience to Belvoir.
Acknowledging the challenge of selling tickets in a cost-of-living crisis, Belvoir’s executive director, Aaron Beach, spoke of the company’s commitment to putting audiences first, using a “dynamic pricing” approach for tickets alongside community engagement and concession programs to make sure there was “a price type for everyone”.
Flack, meanwhile, said the company’s long-term strategy of moving away from subscribers and towards a wider variety of audiences, while “risky”, had been liberating artistically.
“It’s a tightrope walk, because it means you are reliant on single ticket sales and late buying patterns. But if theatre is good, people come to it, and that’s been our experience.”
