Rachel Griffiths will return to the Australian stage for the first time in 25 years in a new play about artist Clarice Beckett.
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Next year, the Total Control and Muriel's Wedding actor will star as the artist, considered a visionary of Australian modernism, in the play Clarice at Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC).
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It's Griffiths's first stage role since 2012, when she made her Broadway debut in the play Other Desert Cities.
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"When Other Desert Cities finished, I swore I'd never do theatre again," Griffiths says.
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For the play's six-month run, Griffith juggled her emotionally charged role with raising her three kids.
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Now they are mostly grown, she feels ready to return to the stage, to tell the kind of distinctly Australian story that motivated her to move home after 20 years in the US.
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"This is a snapshot of 30s Melbourne and how hard it was for women artists of the time to practice and be collected," she says.
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she → practice → time
Still, she admits to finding making theatre exhausting, which has kept her away from the stage.
"I haven't come across something I've wanted to bleed for until now," she says.
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"The pull for me is the times we live in.
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There's a desperate desire to connect in a world where we are increasingly alone on our own screens.
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"This will be a chance to collectively share something very tender, ephemeral and human — something only theatre can do.
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But it's not a case of Griffiths being convinced to return to theatre.
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It was the actor who brought Clarice — by actor-turned-writer-director Trudy Hellier (Round the Twist) — to MTC's artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks.
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Originally pitched as a movie, Griffiths had a sense the story could be "sublime" for a theatre audience that could be "perhaps more abstract and ephemeral than a film".
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"[I love] telling stories about who we are and our history and shining a light particularly on brilliant women and stories audiences may know but not as deeply as they could," she says.
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Clarice is one of 11 plays in MTC's 2027 season, which also includes a new Indigenous-led adaptation of sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds and a play exploring how then-prime minister Bob Hawke's reaction to a "rebel" cricket tour to South Africa was one of the catalysts for greater sanctions against the apartheid regime.
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An overlooked artist
Beckett all but disappeared from Australian art history after her death in 1935, at the age of 48.
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For decades, almost 2,000 of her works were stored — and neglected — in an open-sided farm shed near Benalla in rural Victoria before they were uncovered by curator and art historian Rosalind Hollinrake in 1970.
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In recent years, Beckett has been celebrated with retrospectives in Geelong in 2023 and Adelaide in 2021.
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A touring exhibition of Beckett works collected by the National Gallery of Australia opens in Goulburn on September 25.
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In 2022, she hosted an episode of ABC TV's Great Southern Landscapes where she tried to find the exact spot from which the artist painted Melbourne's Luna Park.
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Beckett painted Luna Park when it was closed due to the Spanish flu pandemic.
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The painting gained greater resonance for Griffiths over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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"It's magnificent," she says.
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"I walked past it every day during our lockdowns."
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One of the starting points for bringing Beckett's story to the stage was the spate of interactive digital exhibitions coming to Australia, featuring artworks by the likes of Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.
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"They offered an insight into art through accessible and immersive experiences," Griffiths says.
"At the end of them though, I didn't really come out understanding the process of the artists.
"
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With Clarice, we have a chance to do both.
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It's also an opportunity to challenge the idea "dying infamous or unrecognised is a tragedy", she says.
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Instead, she thinks there's much we can learn from the artist about how to connect with the world around us.
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"Clarice died unknown but she got to sit and observe nature every day she practised her craft," Griffiths says.
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"Her life was lived on her terms.
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"
Griffiths is also interested in Hollinrake's role ensuring Beckett's place in the canon.
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"It speaks to the theme of women hunting history to make sure great women are not forgotten," she says.
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New Australian writing
MTC's 2027 season features six new Australian works, including Clarice; the cricket play, titled Rebels; and a new play by Andrew Bovell (Lantana) about the loved ones of people with substance use disorders.
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Phar Lap: The Electro-Swing Musical, which premiered at Hayes Theatre in Sydney in 2025, also transfers to MTC as part of a national tour.
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"I wanted to continue the mission to put new work at the centre of everything we do," Sarks says.
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Kate Mulvany (My Brilliant Career) has drawn upon her experience of severe scoliosis (a sideways curvature of the spine) and related chronic pain to adapt William Shakespeare's Richard III as a one-woman show.
"To play multiple characters or tell a whole story alone on stage, you have to employ very clever, quite virtuosic theatre-making techniques," Sarks says.
"
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The audience is almost constantly aware they are in a theatre being told a story …
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they → tell → story
Two new Australian works are by Indigenous writers: road-trip comedy Dirty Diamonds by Abbie-lee Lewis, a co-production with Belvoir in Sydney, starring Lila McGuire and Ruby Henaway; and a new War of the Worlds by Claire G Coleman.
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…and 21 more, not listed.
The Aporia