Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.

For much of My Brilliant Career’s length, Franklin’s novel (published in 1901) seems to have been reduced to its lowest common denominator, a not unusual tendency in musicals. The fifteen-year-old we first meet is a ‘brat’ version of Sybylla Melvyn, or at least as close to a version of ‘brat’ (chosen by the Collins English Dictionary as the word of 2024 and defined by its chief instigator as ‘very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things’) as a daughter of nineteenth-century rural Australia can get.

Gone, it seems, is the fretting spirit of the girl Franklin described in her introduction to the novel, so too the ‘life creep[ing] on for ever ... with its agonising monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality’. This singing and dancing version of Sybylla doesn’t look to have worked a day in her life. We get little sense of the exhausting labour, the ‘fiendish’ summers and the aching emptiness of her life in the bush. This Sybylla has not dragged cattle from the mud, nor has she trekked long miles to fetch her abject father from the pub at midnight (in this version of the story the job is given to her brother, Horace).

There seems little prospect that this Sybylla will, as Henry Lawson noted in his preface to the first edition of the novel, be among those Australians of the bush who ‘toil and bake and suffer’. Oh, she complains, and she grizzles, and she yearns for something more, but she has all the airs and attitude of a modern-day teenager who has stepped through some incomprehensible portal and landed in Possum Gully, 1895. She is cheeky and sulky in equal measure, a nascent version of twenty-first century female ‘empowerment’.

For anyone who comes looking for Franklin’s Sybylla, this Sybylla is, at first sight, quite the disappointment. But then, as we watch musical-Sybylla’s rite of passage from whiny brat to fearsome young woman, something quite magical happens. Even the purists (among whom I count myself) will ultimately find this adaptation of My Brilliant Career not only completely disarming, but an utter joy.

The musical gives us the bare bones of Franklin’s novel (book by Sheridan Harbridge and Dean Bryant). Sybylla (Kala Gare) lives on a dairy farm in Possum Gully, a dry dust bowl in outback New South Wales. A drought has struck, and her father is forced to shoot their last cow. He seeks solace in gambling and drink. Sybylla seeks solace in books, art, and music, things as scarce in Possum Gully as water. She must, her mother tells her, find work as a governess – the only thing she is fit to do – so as to save the family from absolute penury. Sybylla is rescued by her maternal grandmother who suggests Sybylla be sent to Caddagat – the home Sybylla remembers from her childhood – where she might be finished and, with any luck, find herself a husband.

My Brilliant Career (photograph by Pia Johnson)

If Possum Gully represents all that is coarse and uncultured, Caddagat is refinement and cultivation. There is a tuned piano. There are books and singing and dancing. There are also men, and despite being deemed plain, almost ugly, by her grandmother, Sybylla soon finds herself winning the attention of two locals: Frank (Cameron Bajraktarevic-Hayward), a vain and foppish jackeroo who is having something of a gap-year in the colonies; and Harry (Raj Labade), the handsome, aloof owner of Five-Bob Downs, the richest and most extensive farm in the district.

In Franklin’s novel, Sybylla describes Harry as ‘my first, my last, my only real sweetheart’. Her love for him – a love she herself never seems to entirely understand – and his offer of love and marriage to her is the turning point of her life. The fate of her own mother has shown her how readily a polished and genteel young woman can be made raw and indigent and old through the institution of marriage. Should Sybylla choose to marry one of these men, what would become of her desire not to be forgotten by history, her desire to write and express herself, to escape the silence that seems to be a woman’s lot in this world? What would become of her brilliant career?

Sybylla’s response to these questions is the inspirational finale, ‘Someone Like Me’. Here, in a setting that embodies the light and vastness of an outback sunset (Marg Horwell, set and costume design), the musical is wholly anchored in Franklin’s novel, a triumphant Sybylla embracing her defiance, her independence, and her uncertain future.

Like the heroine at its heart, the music and songs of My Brilliant Career (music by Mathew Frank, lyrics by Dean Bryant) are firmly embedded in the twenty-first century and include several literal showstoppers: Harry’s troubadour-like ballads, both flirty and lovelorn; Frank’s razzle-dazzle proposal; and Sybylla’s uncompromising rebuttal of his overtures. In ‘Someone Like Me’ and another number about an out-of-tune piano, songwriters Frank and Bryant manage to capture in microcosm the poetic sensibility that defines Sybylla.

Kala Gare as Sybylla is a genuine star: funny, charismatic, and with a voice that can trill and rumble and soar. She makes Sybylla’s transformation from larrikin child (she looks at times like a cockatoo with her white shift and her crest of yellow hair) to soulful poet entirely credible, and her rapport with the audience is unbreakable. We cannot help but will her on, gripe as she gripes, love as she loves, suffer as she suffers.

The other star of the show is Anne-Louise Sarks, whose direction of the production – the nadirs and crescendos of Sybylla’s story, her delights and torments, and the whirl and confusion of the world around her – is flawless. Crucially, Sarks nurtures a unity of vision that underpins Gare’s performance and threads through the acting ensemble – nine performers and instrumentalists playing multiple roles and multiple instruments – and supporting creatives (including musical director Victoria Falconer, vocal arranger James Simpson, lighting designer Matt Scott, and choreographer Amy Campbell). Sarks is not afraid to embrace the anachronisms inherent in the musical’s book and song, and the irreverent, raucous tone with which she imbues the production encourages the audience to do the same.

There will be those who feel some of Horwell’s set and costume designs are occasionally too overwrought (the M’Swats look as though they have been rummaging through the Mardi Gras discards bin), while others will regret the musical’s diminishment of the novel’s irony. Others, like me, may lament that the production simplifies the complexity of Sybylla’s relationship with Harry and her efforts to bully out of him the fierce passion she believes should accompany true love. But the power of this production is that all such resistance is futile.

It may seem at first glance that My Brilliant Career has merely imposed a twenty-first sensibility onto a nineteenth-century story. In doing so, however, it has become its own indelible entity. There is space enough for both versions of Sybylla Melvyn’s life, and if the musical encourages people to pick up Franklin’s novel and discover for themselves the other Sybylla, that’s a more than welcome outcome.

My Brilliant Career (Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Sumner Theatre until 18 December 2024. Performance attended: November 12.