Total impact: Channelling rock rebel Chrissy Amphlett
It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain when Sheridan Harbridge takes us on a live-wire journey through the words and music of the rebel queen of Australian rock – The Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett – at Brisbane Festival.
Actor, writer, director and all-around creative force Sheridan Harbridge is no stranger to portraying the lives of strong women and breathing life into their complexities, quirks and foibles.
Whether she’s adapting their stories for the stage – as she did for Melbourne Theatre Company’s musical version of Miles Franklin’s novel, My Brilliant Career – or embodying them herself, as was the case when she took the lead in Suzie Miller’s powerhouse play Prima Facie, she’s familiar with embodying powerful female characters.
Given her career resume to date, it is perhaps unsurprising that Harbridge is currently treading the boards in a cabaret tribute to the life and music of one of Australia’s greatest female rockers, The Divinyls’ frontwoman Chrissy Amphlett.
Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett, the one-woman show that she also helped to write and develop, makes its Queensland debut as part of Brisbane Festival, running at Brisbane Powerhouse from September 19 to 21.
For Harbridge, who has built an acclaimed career telling the stories of redoubtable women, the story of Amphlett – the uncompromising woman who wore a school girl’s uniform onstage and combined unbridled passion with raw sexuality as she came to rule the then male-dominated Australian rock music scene – ultimately proved irresistible, both as a writer and as a performer.
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“Making this show has been a neurotic high-pressure meltdown,” Harbridge says. “Because there’s the emotional world that the shows live in, which is what it would have meant to her, and what it means to people who knew her, and what it means to the people who worship her.
“And then there’s the technical aspect of trying to accurately capture an extraordinarily enigmatic, electric and mercurial force of a person, and to put that onstage has been tremendously daunting and very, very challenging.
“I also think that, in many ways, rock and roll and theatre don’t really belong together in the minds of so many people because rock exists in the music, in the sweaty gathering of bodies ready to scream and drink and dance together, and have their face blasted off by sound, you know. And then if you try and put that in a theatrical setting, theatre is inherently a place where people follow rules and act very politely and it’s not an anarchic space in which to recreate the world of rock.”
Harbridge co-created Amplified with collaborator and multi-award-winning director Sarah Goodes, who is perhaps best known for her direction of Justine Clarke in the titular role of Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Joanna Murray-Smith’s acclaimed play, Julia, about former prime minister Julia Gillard.
‘From the very beginning, though, I knew that I wasn’t going to try to imitate her’
Strangely enough, similarities exist between the two shows insofar as both use anecdotes and lived experience to tell their subject’s story, with music obviously a primary force reverberating throughout Amplified.
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“I did find the notion of performing Chrissy incredibly daunting,” Harbridge says. “From the very beginning, though, I knew that I wasn’t going to try to imitate her because that would, really, just be incredibly disappointing for everybody involved – for me and for the audience – and you don’t want to do a show where people are like: ‘Really? Really? Is that her? Would she really have done that? That’s not how I remember her!’
“There is more power in telling the story of her and conjuring the electricity that she would weave around herself. So a lot of the show is actually about building the story of what was happening around her when we were introduced to her, when she blew our faces off with that voice and that music, and what was going on socially, where women were at both socially and politically, of course, because it was such a different time.
“We were standing in those beer barns and nightclubs watching her and she really cut a broad knife through all of the artifice and was a real breath of fresh air.”
Since graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 2006 Harbridge has built a formidable career. She wrote and directed the musical, Songs for the Fallen, which won Best New Musical at the New York Music Theatre Festival in 2015 and a Green Room Award for Best New Artist. Since then, she has starred in and directed productions for companies including the Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Theatre Company, Griffin Theatre Studio and Red Line Theatre.
In 2022 she was awarded the Create NSW Musical Theatre Fellowship, which enabled her to develop The Flash Mob, a musical chronicling the stories of the rebellious and resilient women of the Cascades Female Factory in 1830s Tasmania. The project allowed her to once again shine the spotlight on untold women’s stories, exploring the lives and the displacement, mistreatment and forced migration of convict women and girls.
Last year Harbridge wrote the highly acclaimed musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career as well as writing and directing A Model Murder cabaret for the 2024 Sydney Festival. She is currently preparing to stage Phar Lap at the Hayes Theatre Company in Sydney, as well as developing a top-secret new work as part of her role as the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2025 Patrick White Fellow.
‘My goal was to do her justice as a woman and as an artist’
“I love telling women’s stories and portraying their struggles and experiences in ways that are accurate and honest and, yeah, sometimes also uncomfortable,” she says. “I guess my number one goal with portraying Chrissy was to give a performance where I could imagine her sitting in the audience and liking what she was seeing.
“My goal was to do her justice as a woman and as an artist. I knew I had to get out of the way of her story and find the parts of myself that are similar and just let them sit there, alongside her. That way it doesn’t have to be about me ‘putting on’ Chrissy but letting parts of myself that are similar to Chrissy just expand and fill the room.”
Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett plays Brisbane Powerhouse, September 19-21.
brisbanefestival.com.au/events/amplified-the-exquisite-rock-and-rage-of-chrissy-amphlett