Rachel Griffiths returns to Australian stage after 25 years for Clarice Beckett play

Rachel Griffiths will return to the Australian stage for the first time in 25 years in a new play about artist Clarice Beckett.

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).

It's Griffiths's first stage role since 2012, when she made her Broadway debut in the play Other Desert Cities. At home, her last stage role was in the modern classic Proof at MTC in 2002.

"When Other Desert Cities finished, I swore I'd never do theatre again," Griffiths says.

For the play's six-month run, Griffith juggled her emotionally charged role with raising her three kids.

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.

"This is a snapshot of 30s Melbourne and how hard it was for women artists of the time to practise and be collected," she says.

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.

"The pull for me is the times we live in. There's a desperate desire to connect in a world where we are increasingly alone on our own screens.

"This will be a chance to collectively share something very tender, ephemeral and human — something only theatre can do." 

But it's not a case of Griffiths being convinced to return to theatre. 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.

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". 

For Sarks, it was a no-brainer.

"[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.

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.

An overlooked artist 

Beckett all but disappeared from Australian art history after her death in 1935, at the age of 48.

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. Only 359 were salvageable.

In recent years, Beckett has been celebrated with retrospectives in Geelong in 2023 and Adelaide in 2021. A touring exhibition of Beckett works collected by the National Gallery of Australia opens in Goulburn on September 25.

She's an artist Griffiths has long been interested in. 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.

Beckett painted Luna Park when it was closed due to the Spanish flu pandemic.

The painting gained greater resonance for Griffiths over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's magnificent," she says. "I walked past it every day during our lockdowns."

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.

"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. 

"With Clarice, we have a chance to do both."

It's also an opportunity to challenge the idea "dying infamous or unrecognised is a tragedy", she says.

Instead, she thinks there's much we can learn from the artist about how to connect with the world around us. 

"Clarice died unknown but she got to sit and observe nature every day she practised her craft," Griffiths says. "Her life was lived on her terms."

Griffiths is also interested in Hollinrake's role ensuring Beckett's place in the canon.

"It speaks to the theme of women hunting history to make sure great women are not forgotten," she says.

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.

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.

The focus on new Australian work is deliberate.

"I wanted to continue the mission to put new work at the centre of everything we do," Sarks says.

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.

"The audience is almost constantly aware they are in a theatre being told a story … It couldn't be television. It's capital-T theatre."

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.

Researching the story while she was living in London before the pandemic, Sarks learned English writer HG Wells was partly inspired by the Black War between settlers and Indigenous people in Tasmania, which ran from 1824 to 1831.

Sarks recalls thinking: "This is a story about us and we need to own that."

Reading Coleman's speculative fiction novel Terra Nullius, which draws on Australia's colonial history, Sarks decided she might be the right person to make a new Australian version of The War of the Worlds.

After its Melbourne season, Coleman's The War of the Worlds is expected to tour regional Victoria.

"It's incredibly exciting to be able to champion First Nations work in the way that we are, and to place these stories front and centre in the season," Sarks says.

It's also a kind of course correction, the artistic director boasting the company has presented and collaborated on more work by Indigenous artists since she joined in 2021 than the 70 years prior.

"The increase is enormous, but it's vital if we want to talk about understanding who we are and our history," Sarks says.

"[We] learn and benefit so much from the artistry and the making practices of these brilliant artists."

Unexpected dangers

Dirty Diamonds and Phar Lap aren't the only shows that will see MTC collaborate with other companies in 2027.

Stereophonic by David Adjmi is a co-production with Belvoir and Queensland Theatre Company (QTC), while John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower is a co-production with Sydney Theatre Company (STC).

Both are buzzy American plays making their Australian debuts.

"It's wonderful for us to be able to hold up the quality of our new work next to these international works and for audiences to be able to see and appreciate both," Sarks says.

The artistic director praises how companies working together increases how many people get to see a show, which becomes "richer, deeper and stronger over time" and keeps cast and crew employed for sustained periods.

"It is something companies are needing to do more," Sarks says. "It has really helped us stay large in our season, because we really want to be able to make a very ambitious big offer for audiences."

But Sarks is frank about the potential consequences of that increased collaboration.

"The danger is that over time there will be fewer shows," she says.

"I want us to be cautious as an industry and sure that we are still providing opportunities for artists — and that's why new work development is still at the core of everything we do."

It's a mission that has been successful this year, with the three Australian shows that opened the season — the return of the My Brilliant Career musical, Jean Tong's Do Not Pass Go, and Dennis McIntosh's West Gate, about the 1970 bridge disaster — selling out in their final weeks.

"They're works we created and developed here and audiences were hungry for them," Sarks says.

"That gives me so much hope for the future of Australian storytelling and theatre."