She carries the weight of every woman past, every slur and slight endured, every filthy nugget mined from the dank mines of misogyny and ignited in her face. As Julia Gillard, MacGregor never slips into easy imitation—she stalks the role, then strikes, distilling her subject into something fierce, exact, and unforgettable; what follows is a blistering 90-minute monologue, delivered with surgical precision, total authority, and a charge of emotion that crackles through every line. This show speaks of the past and the current way we treat female leaders and demands we show them the respect they deserve.
“My play,” writes Joanna Murray-Smith about her acclaimed political drama Julia, “is not a judgement on (former Australian Prime Minister) Julia Gillard’s term in office – but it is, like all plays, a judgement on the world.” It certainly is. In 90 minutes, Murray-Smith takes us at pace from Gillard’s childhood in Wales, and the sense of fairness instilled by her mining advocate father, through her time as a student rep, corporate lawyer and on to her successful toppling of Labor leader Kevin Rudd and the razor-thin 2010 election win that made her Australia’s first female prime minister. All of it unfolds against a seething underbelly of toxic male culture, fuelled by entitlement and sustained not only by parliament and the Murdoch media machine, but by a wider public acceptance that this was simply the status quo.
The play is delivered as a monologue, with sole performer Lara MacGregor switching between Gillard, first-person narrator, and a gallery of mimicked or paraphrased central characters. For the narrator, MacGregor keeps her Kiwi voice, delivering lines at a rapid but clear pace. The aim is to gloss over Gillard’s early years, but she keeps it lively by breaking the fourth wall, asking for a drum roll or tossing in an aside. At one point, a prop gets away on her and she looks out as if to ask, “How do I work this thing?” Moments like that make the show feel more immediate, and help us warm to 'Gillard'. By the end, it is hard not to be on her side.
Murray-Smith notes that this brisk biographical treatment is necessary because Gillard herself offered little about her pre-political life or private character, despite several interviews with the playwright (as noted in the show's programme). That absence becomes its own creative prompt: “a void that became a powerful seduction. I could create my own version, a fictional foundation for an actual life.”
And that’s what we get. Director Mel Dodge helps us leap over the vagaries of Gillard’s early life by having MacGregor — no delicate 20-year-old gymnast, by the way — shove tables, leap on furniture, and turn chairs and microphones from intimate radio booths into crowded podiums and back again. The physical chaos keeps the momentum up and brings flashes of fun between the heavier moments.
But the real reason we are here is to get to that speech. The play carefully sets the scene, right down to who was in the chamber, the books on the table, the opposition front row, and the Hansard stenographers poised to type. As Gillard begins — “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man” — the action freezes, and the story shifts back to her childhood in the Welsh mining town of Barry.
From there, the narrative traces her family’s migration to Australia, her teenage years in Adelaide, and her early political activism at university. These scenes carry humour and energy that sharply contrast with the intensity of the parliamentary sequences. As Gillard rises through the ranks, she hardens — and that only makes her a more obvious target.
A silent Young Woman appears throughout, sometimes representing Gillard’s younger self, sometimes the women of Australia, sometimes a conscience. She stands as a witness to history, reminding us of the burden carried by the first woman to hold the nation’s highest office. Some metaphors land more strongly than others: Lady (“witch-bitch”) Macbeth hovers over Gillard’s toppling of the “Ego” Kevin Rudd — “Who knew there’d be so much blood in him” — while MacGregor’s sensitive recital of Gillian Clarke’s poem Six Bells — 28th June 1960, about a Welsh mining disaster, told from the viewpoint of the women whose men never came home, gives Gillard’s backstory greater weight and deepens the play’s arc toward confronting misogyny in public life.
Over 90 minutes, we race back towards that moment — 15 minutes on 9 October 2012 — a blistering parliamentary rebuke in which Gillard confronted opposition leader Tony Abbott, accused him of hypocrisy, and refused to be lectured on sexism by someone she argued had a long record of misogynistic statements and behaviour.
As the play makes clear, it did not come out of the blue. It followed years of sustained attacks on Gillard and on women in leadership more broadly. She was targeted for the most absurd things: her partner was mocked for being a hairdresser; she was criticised for lacking domestic instincts because she was once filmed beside an empty fruit bowl. It would be laughable if it had not been so vicious.
That was the broader climate. Nothing was off limits: appearance, marital status, and her decision not to have children were all turned into public ammunition by politicians, the media, and blokes holding forth over beers at the local RSL.
The context matters. Gillard was responding to Abbott’s criticism of Speaker of the House Peter Slipper, whose exposure for sending explicit and deeply misogynistic text messages prompted Abbott to demand his resignation — and, by association, hers too. Gillard argued the outrage was opportunistic, designed to topple a government clinging to a one-seat majority, while ignoring the wider culture of sexism in politics. She also pointed to Abbott’s longstanding friendship with Slipper and his own attacks on her, including appearing outside Parliament beside protesters holding signs reading “Ditch the Witch!”, alongside the “deliberately barren” slur and the now infamous restaurant menu joke.
Her speech did more than accuse Abbott of hypocrisy. It widened the lens to expose the double standards faced by women in leadership and the entrenched sexism embedded in politics and media culture.
Its famous defiance — “not now, not ever” — became a globally recognised moment, calling out not just one opponent but a whole culture of bias, bullying, and misogyny directed at women in power. I had to pinch myself. This was 2012. I thought we had moved past all that. Apparently not. The scene is both powerful and deeply disturbing, a reminder of how much remains unchanged. I was shocked by how quickly the hostility towards Gillard intensified over the two-and-a-bit years she was in office.
The play also interrogates the media. Much of this predates the most feral years of social media, yet even then it was a vile period. Narratives were constructed, amplified, and weaponized, with real consequences. Murray-Smith does not present Gillard as flawless. She made unpopular decisions in office and earned enemies across the chamber, including over hard line asylum seeker policies, the carbon tax despite a pre-election pledge, and a mining tax that drew fierce industry backlash. Murray-Smith touches on these lightly to keep the focus on the speech, portraying instead a leader navigating the contradictions and compromises of political life.
Mel Dodge’s direction gives MacGregor room to engage directly with the audience, and that is what hooks us in. Ninety minutes is a long time to be talked at, but that is not how it feels. MacGregor takes us on the journey because we are willing to go with her.
Mark McEntyre’s set is intriguing: five large floating panels covered in shiny Perspex. Usually that would be a stage no-no because of reflections, but with Marcus McShane’s lighting they become mirrors, screens, and windows onto two large surfaces behind. The intention of those screens seem to be showing us a kind of living portrait, with MacGregor’s head and shoulders projected for key moments. I am not convinced it fully worked. At times the screens display relevant text, and twice a meadow of flowers appears to suggest early sage guidance from an old university professor. Otherwise, they feel underused. Newspaper clippings, parliamentary imagery, or footage of the speech might have made more of them.
The costumes are almost invisible — just a couple of jackets — but they matter. Shiloh Dobie had to source the right colours and style to match Gillard’s wardrobe, itself another subject of media ridicule. Hell, even Germaine Greer was taking shots, saying on ABC’s Q&A in 2012: “What I want her to do is get rid of those bloody jackets!”
Carrying the weight of the world in this Whanganui-a-Tara performance is Lara MacGregor — actor, director, dramaturg, and creative leader whose career spans theatre, film, and television. Trained in New York under Uta Hagen and later gaining a directing qualification from NIDA, she spent a decade acting in the United States before returning home to become Associate Artistic Director of the Court Theatre and later Artistic Director of Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre.
She has directed more than forty productions across Australasia, including Red, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and In the Next Room, and delivered acclaimed stage performances such as Lady Macbeth and Annie Wilkes in Misery. On screen, she has appeared in Shortland Street, Netflix’s Clickbait and One of Us Is Lying, and the feature film Bad Behaviour. Alongside acting and directing, she is also a photographer, performance coach, and producer through her company Birds of a Feather.
So yes, wow! I’m fan-boying a little here. What a CV. But what matters is what she does with it.
MacGregor doesn’t just slip on Gillard’s wardrobe or recite her words—she fully inhabits her. Before the show, I revisited footage of the former prime minister, including the speech, to tune into her rhythm and physical presence; what’s striking is how MacGregor resists easy impersonation. Instead, she moves fluidly in and out of narration, choosing her moments—then suddenly, precisely, she captures Gillard’s essence and delivers it, clean and concentrated. It’s exactly the right calibration for this piece.
The result is gripping: a tightly held 90 minutes of monologue delivered with authority, clarity, and emotional weight. Yes, it was opening night, and there were a few minor jitters—inevitable—but they barely registered. I was locked in from start to finish.
While it tells an Australian story, it is by no means foreign to us here in Aotearoa. Quite the opposite. That is why Julia lands like a gut punch. Its themes of leadership, gender, and public scrutiny remain brutally current.
This is no gentle reflection; it is a stab at the heart of reality. Public condemnation is so often not about justice at all, but about bullying, fear, and the desire to punish anyone who challenges entrenched power.
When I think of the treatment of Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, former Wellington mayor Tori Whanau, Finance Minister Nicola Willis, and so many other prominent wāhine in media and politics, I am not shocked so much as appalled that we can still be this petty, spiteful, and ignorant.
Why do we still judge women in power by their looks, their marital status, their private lives, or trivial details that would barely register for male counterparts? Why can we not assess their actions, policies, and achievements by the same measure? Would you ask a male politician why he was wearing a day old business shirt with a grubby collar, or why his fruit bowl had no bananas in it?
And why, in Gillard’s case, are we so much harsher on female leaders who make mistakes than on male leaders? Why do we keep tolerating grotesque behaviour from politicians — Trump, Johnson, Rudd, or our own miscreants like Seymour or Peters — while still finding new witches to burn?
If this play leaves you with one thought, it is this: after all these years of struggle for respect and recognition, have things really changed for women in politics and leadership? Women in power should never have to put up with crap like that — not now, not ever!
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