The Australian musical can seem like a chimera, something fantastical and unlikely; even the rare successes often disappear into obscurity after their initial runs. Let’s hope this isn’t the fate of My Brilliant Career, a musical adaptation of Miles Franklin’s beloved novel that manages to shake its source material like a snow globe without dislodging its power or charm. With a book by Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant, music by Mathew Frank and lyrics by Bryant, it triumphs in a genre that tends to elude us in this country.
One of the central challenges for the creative team is the gap in time and sensibility between Franklin’s world and our own. Waves of feminist thought have washed over us since protagonist Sybylla Melvyn (Kala Gare) turned down a perfectly good offer of marriage in order to write down her thoughts, and the danger is that her struggles could feel trite or irrelevant. A contemporary Sybylla would be an absurdity but then a stringently reverent period piece wouldn’t suit her either. She bursts off the page and needs to do the same on stage.
It becomes clear in the first few minutes that this Sybylla – described variously as fevered, wild, wicked, plain and simply mad – is a force of nature, defiant of her station and determined to carve a future for herself that doesn’t involve drudgery and confinement. Frank and Bryant give her an introductory song straight out of pub rock, directly addressed to the audience, and Gare nails its force and audacity. Sybylla develops more texture and vulnerability as she goes on, but it’s a potent opening salvo.
We learn several key things from the outset: Sybylla is utterly resolved to escape the stultifying tedium of farm life at Possum Gully, no matter the consequences; the story she is telling has no plot to speak of; and it’s assuredly not a romance. It is a delight to see this young woman with the soul of a high romantic – who positively swoons over music, books and the trappings of a cultural life – shun love in favour of a deeper connection to the self. She has much in common with Henry James’s Isabel Archer and George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, but she doesn’t let the marriage plot overwhelm her as they do. She flicks the tragic impulse away as if swatting bush flies.
The first suitor who comes knocking is Frank (Cameron Bajraktarevic-Hayward), an Englishman sent over for a spot of jackarooing and some disdainful condescension; Sybylla laughs in his face. The second suitor, Harry Beecham (Raj Labade), is a vast improvement: he is wealthy, handsome and transfixed by Sybylla’s gumption. His wooing of her takes place over years and the will she/won’t she tension of his proposal becomes the engine that keeps the show moving.
It’s good the story is so simple, because the music is intricate and complex, ranging from that rock-inflected opening through folk, pop and even a moment or two of hip-hop. It has its fair share of traditionally structured musical theatre numbers that establish a primary mood and resolve neatly, but it also has sweeping solos full of jagged, lurching rhythms and oddly digressive phrasing. Bryant’s lyrics are richly rewarding, suggestive of Franklin’s soaring poetic register but attuned to the ways she pricks pomposity and sentiment at every turn.
Director Anne-Louise Sarks musters the disparate elements with virtuosity, aided enormously by a talented and vivacious cast. The first act is raucous and mercurial, highly spirited and broadly comic. The second act is more delicate and naturalistic, save a hilarious discursion involving Sybylla’s aborted time as a governess of the M’Swat children (cue a brilliant barrage of hard, flat rhymes like grot and snot). Marg Horwell’s stunning set and costumes are a marvel of moods and textures, and Matt Scott’s lighting is luxurious and inventive.
Not a single cast member disappoints, from Christina O’Neill’s masterful doubling of Sybylla’s weary mother and warmly encouraging aunt, to HaNy Lee’s turns as quivering younger sister Gertie and Melbourne sex-bomb Blanche. Labade is a dreamy love interest, and Lincoln Elliott is beautifully expressive as Jimmy, the most intransigent and sullen of the M’Swat kids. Of course, all this would come to naught if our Sybylla failed to move us; she’s the one we’ve come to see, after all. The role is massive, almost never off stage, and Gare is a total powerhouse, lighting the stage like a grand, undying flare.
So much talent and craftsmanship has gone into My Brilliant Career – not to mention five solid years of development – that its achievement may seem inevitable. Harbridge and Bryant’s book, aggressively anachronistic in a way that strangely echoes the shock and innovation of the source material, bridges the gap in time with deceptive ease. Fiercely feminist and class aware, Sybylla addresses “my dear fellow Australians” with an expansiveness and generosity that feels almost revolutionary. She wants us to be different, not so mired or conventional, and for the time she and that gorgeously multicultural cast are on stage, we feel it is possible. Surely a brilliant career awaits.
My Brilliant Career is on at Southbank theatre, the Sumner until 18 December
