My Brilliant Career musical: Stella Miles Franklin’s girl hero still resonates with furious power

Stella Miles Franklin was born in 1879 and while she was a teenager growing up in rural New South Wales, she wrote My Brilliant Career.

It is one of the seminal works of Australian literature and it was absolutely, especially at the time, a revolutionary story because it centred the interior life and ambitions of a girl.

Her creation, Sybylla Melvyn, was born from Franklin’s own experiences and yearning for a bigger life than the one that was assigned to her. More than a century after its publication in 1901, My Brilliant Career still resonates with a furious power.

This year is shaping up to be a real convergence moment for Franklin’s legacy.

Netflix has upcoming an original miniseries adaptation of My Brilliant Career, starring the effervescent Philippa Northeast as Sybylla.

Sydney Writers Festival will host Alexandra Lapierre, who wrote the book The Very Secretive and Passionate Stella Miles Franklin, and last year saw the publication of Kerrie Davies’ tome, Miles Franklin Undercover, which detailed the hardship which followed the publication of her lauded book.

And, of course, there is the revival of Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2024 acclaimed musical stage production.

Now playing in Sydney as part of its national tour, My Brilliant Career couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

The world outside is burning, literally, but in that theatre, there is joy and optimism. The play courses with irrepressible, charismatic energy as the audience is transported into Franklin’s world, as they’re asked to take as is, this 15-year-old girl who is led by her heart and her emotions.

The production started as a project by Dean Bryant and Mathew Frank who wrote the lyrics and music before they asked actor and playwright Sheridan Harbridge to come onboard.

“They sort of went, ‘We probably need a woman to join this party’, which is very wise,” Harbridge told The Nightly. “Dean came to me and said, ‘We think we need someone to make it more chaotically 15’.

“I was like, ‘How dare you think of me that way and I’m definitely the right person!’.”

Harbridge was familiar with Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film adaptation, a classic of the Australia New Wave, but hadn’t read the book. When she opened Franklin’s original story, she found that Sybylla was the same “precocious, annoying, frustrating, but wiser than all of us” 15-year-old girl that could’ve existed in any decade.

“If we can peel away the ideas you think of when you think of a period piece and just get to the kernel of the 15-year-old she wrote, then we’ve got a timeless heroine that we could look at today,” Harbridge explained.

Kala Gare originated the role in the 2024 production and returned for this year’s revival. She is a performer with boundless energy who, along with a multi-hyphenate, talented cast of actors and musicians, can carry the demands of the show and never skip a beat in terms of unbridled wonder.

She has been approached by audiences young and old, each with their own connection to Sybylla.

“Recently, a woman came up and was telling me how the show really challenged her,” Gare said. “She was someone who had given up a lot of her dreams for a family, and it was beautiful to talk to her. Sybylla’s struggle validated her experience of how hard it was to push against the forces that were saying, ‘This is what you, as a woman, has to do.”

But Gare’s favourites are the young women - yes, there are the theatre kids who want to be up there on the stage, which is gorgeous – but also the ones who just felt Sybylla speak to them.

“I had this one girl come up to me and she said, ‘I’m doing to do the university major that I want to do, not what my parents want’.

“It’s such an identity story, and the bravery of actually looking inward, and going, ‘OK, my mapping is different to what I’m seeing around me, what am I going to do about it? If this isn’t the life that I want, what am I going to do about it?’.”

Harbridge said that Sybylla embodies that spirit of young people, in every generation, who looks at the system and asks, “Why are you living like this, do you not see it’s upside down?”.

Franklin’s book was met with open arms but not from all. As much as she was lauded, she was also derided.

“It is, still is, incredibly hard for a woman to raise their head above the pack and scream, ‘something’s wrong’. They’re so open to attack, and Franklin went through that and women are still going through that today,” the playwright said.

For a character that has meant something, perhaps something different, to generations of readers and viewers - a pioneer in Franklin’s time, a warrior in Armstrong’s era - My Brilliant Career in 2026 has its own resonance.

“What we love is a messy woman, and a messy woman who can contradict herself in front of our eyes, and that is not a flaw,” Harbridge said. “That is living. She can be unlikeable.

“To be a real 15 year old who was self-righteous, demanding, and then you get to watch her grow and mature and have more compassion for the people around her and what they’ve been through.

“It was about making a contradictory, flawed girl who was seeking answers and not having the answers in front of her. That is what we love to see. We need the strength of that story, we need to be reminded of that to not flatten that out of us.”

Harbridge pointed to the difficult life Franklin had after the book’s release, contending with detractors, and the parallels to what modern Australian women such as activists Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins have been put through.

“She exploded into our world and then has to navigate people tearing her down at every step. Miles Franklin had a very similar trajectory, and she herself had to go overseas where she joined the suffragette movement in America because it was less fraught.

“She felt that she had high value there as opposed to being called a dumpy woman in an Australian newspaper.”

My Brilliant Career ended up being a work that caused Franklin a lot of pain, but now, more than 70 years after her death, it is still affecting Australian girls and women and the stories of their lives they have yet to write.

Perhaps, with some luck, My Brilliant Career will take on an even bigger footprint for a new generation, and further afield.

“We have this idea that Australian stories aren’t interesting to the rest of the world, but Gillian Armstrong’s film went international and made Judy Davis’s career and Gillian’s career,” Harbridge said.

“Hopefully the TV series and the musical also gets to shoot across the globe because it’s a story of all girls in so many cultures.”

My Brilliant Career is playing at the Sydney Theatre Company until May 3