Throughout the play, the characters are at times reflected in mirror which doubles as a blacked out window suggesting that while they are what Franklin might call “local material” they are also fictional characters who exist to shed light on the narrator’s struggle to achieve self-determination in an unbending world of male power and wealth-based opportunity.Įnergised by a sense of her own potential, Franklin’s Sybylla desperately wants to make her mark upon the world, whether as a “journalist, singer, actress, politician”.

Happily and disarmingly, Sybylla (an exuberant Nikki Shiels) confesses to the audience that she is very much concerned with “me” – that is, in constructing a female narrator – and placing her in a world that is “real”. Consequently, we have a fuller and deeper impression of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, an appealingly provocative character, created by the 19-year-old Stella Franklin, and which, while located in personal experience, far transcends it.

In her illuminating and dynamic stage adaptation of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career writer Kendall Feaver has included material from further afield than the original, drawing on My Career Goes Bung, Franklin’s childhood memoirs and biographical studies.

My brilliant career by miles franklin