A Model Murder has been commissioned by, and is one of the highlights of, Sydney Festival 2025.
Shirley Beiger was a Sydneysider; a privately educated glamour model, who in 1954 shot and killed her boyfriend, Arthur Griffith, outside the infamous nightclub Chequers. The 23- year- old was on trial three months later, in a case which gripped the nation, and garnered enormous amounts of attention and press. And it was predominantly very much in her favour.
Some of the clippings of the original press reports can be seen here and here.
In a coup for the theatre world, the play, based on a story written by Melanie Tait, is being staged in the actual courtroom the trial took place in, deep within Sydney’s Darlinghurst Courthouse.
A cast of seven, sometimes doubling up in roles, take the audience on an absolute romp through the details of the case, drawing on actual testimonies and transcripts, with a whole lot of cabaret- type musical flair thrown in. A judge is chosen from the audience each night to sit in the high chair, although they don’t contribute to the deliberations. The sensational outcome was decided many years ago, but the play is written in such a thrilling way that the audience is still picking a side and on tenterhooks for the decision.
It’s easy to forget that it was a time when women couldn’t serve on juries, or even be in the main room of the pub, and much of the gender politics of the time is captured in the play.
Sofia Nolan is equally demure and determined as Shirley Beiger. Blazey Best is fantastic in her duel roles as Shirley’s mother Edith, and Gill the Chequers nightclub singer, who not only has a pivotal role in the story, but leads the high camp sing-a-long fun, ensuring that time spent with a murder trial is also a good night out.
Amber McMahon is clever and funny as the narrator and 2KY compere Lyal Richardson, and Anthony Taufa and Marco Chiappi as the legal eagles are on point, and equally as ready to throw caution to the wind and dance around with some feathers.
We managed to sit down with the multi- award winning and completely irresistible writer and director of the play, Sheridan Harbridge, fresh off her success in Melbourne with My Brilliant Career. Previously, her musical Songs for the Fallen won Best Musical and Best Actress at the New York Music Theatre Festival. As an actor she has been a regular presence on the Australian stage and screen. She was the original actor in the acclaimed Prima Facie at the Griffin Theatre, winning Best Actress at the Sydney Theatre Awards.
She not only has A Model Murder in Sydney Festival, she is also the writer and director of Christie Whelan Browne: Life in Plastic, during which, as Harbridge told Irresistible, ‘Christie delivers stand- up like stories about her life and her relationship to her body. She’s gone through a lot, and we have great fun ripping it all apart.’
The writing is so brilliant in A Model Murder, and there’s not even a dip! Did you feel that the script was really tight when you finished it?
We made the show very quickly in the end, but it came together beautifully, and I ruthlessly edited to make sure it felt like a ride. I was so aware of everything we have absorbed about trials comes from TV and film, and how real court is actually very tedious. I wanted to deliver the movie version.
And you managed to make it all singing and dancing as well. Was that always the intention to bring in the musical element?
I always knew we had to give them Chequers. I thought, it’s stupid to give them the show and not enjoy Chequers nightclub. All of the music we included in A Model Murder, like Kate Ceberano and AC/DC, has at some point been performed at Chequers.
Was it hard to permission to put it on in a court?
It was a year’s work for the festival. A very long process. I joined the project around August and it was all ready to go, but even then any site visits were much more complicated than normal, and every prop had to be vetted. Bringing handcuffs in to the court was a palava- they had to be vetted by the Sheriff!
Was A Model Murder an idea that had been kicking around for a while?
Years ago, Olivia Ansell produced an immersive show called Hidden Sydney, which was about King’s Cross, and she looked at the Shirley Beiger story then but it didn’t make it into that production. I think she’d always thought it was something she could bring to Sydney Festival once she became the Festival Director. As I understand it, she was chatting to a Supreme Court Justice at an event, and this judge happened to preside over the same court the trial took place in. She suggested putting on the play in his court and he ran with it. The timing was perfect because the court is ‘dark’ in January meaning the court doesn’t sit. Which fits perfectly with Sydney Festival. The Supreme Court have been so generous and helpful.
How has it felt to work in the courtroom?
I feel like a kid that’s been let loose in an adult’s shop, and nobody is monitoring me. I kept thinking Am I allowed to be in here? I was the actor in the original production of Prima Facie. I spent a lot of time watching trials for research, and so much of that information was completely relevant in A Model Murder. The rituals, the pageantry, the production of the whole thing. On the other side I’ve done a lot of cabaret and immersive theatre so I have the mix of worlds that you see in the show.
Do you think your previous work as an actor informs how you write a play?
I think what makes this play feel so rich is I really tried to write for the cast that we had. I think I’m good at that; writing for a particular actor. It might be because I’m an actor as well, but I think I can find and then match their rhythm. But there’s also that 1950s Australian voice that’s a bit part of this play, and that meant something different to everybody. What everyone’s grandma sounded like is different. It was really fun leaning into how we thought our grandparents would have behaved.
You’re based in Sydney and this is a Sydney play with lots of Sydney references, but you’re often working in Melbourne too?
I’m happy anywhere, and I grew up in country Victoria, so I’ve always spent a lot of time in Melbourne. Recently I was in Melbourne for a long time with My Brilliant Career and the Melbourne Theatre Company. That was another example of writing for a particular actress. Kala Gare is such an amazing talent. We were really luck to get her. She does a lot of pub gigging on a keyboard, no fourth wall, just chatting away to an audience. Not many actors have that lack of self- consciousness. Taking her relaxed demeanour and conflating that with the literary world of Miles Franklin was a fantastic experience and a profound learning curve. Again, I feel I was able to bring learnings from that production into A Model Murder.
What fascinated you about this case?
When I was going through the transcripts, and her statement in the play is all her actual direct statement, and her incredible lines about being “just the girl who polished his shoes for other women,” I was hooked by who this woman was and what was going on in society at this time. There are no twists and turns, there’s no whodunnit. She did it and she admitted it. What I found so fascinating was how everyone wanted her to get off. Arthur Griffith wasn’t probably the worst person in the world, he was doing a light version of some of the arrogance and entitlement we can see in men then and today, but he copped it. I thought it was kind of unreasonable that everyone thought she should go free, and then when I thought more about it, I was equally as fascinated about that time in history.
Women’s roles were in flux after World War II. The Doris Day type films were idolising a housebound and sort of helpless type of femininity. How do you think that was that colliding with the trial?
Women were being forced back into the kitchen, having been working at the heart of the war effort over the previous years. I’ve read that overnight the front of women’s magazines went from pictures of women holding tools, to women in the kitchen with aprons on. That must have been so much of what was going on at the time, and I think somehow it all played in her favour. I scoured the records looking for some kind of critique of her, but couldn’t find one. Women were all behind her, but men too. She was very attractive and well presented, I think there was some sense of saving her, or that she was a good girl for being so domesticated, and she’d been through enough with her three month pre- trial incarceration. I think maybe also men, maybe the men of the jury, didn’t want to go home to their own wives and say they’d put this sort of heroine figure in jail. Another interesting phenomenon of the time was women were getting married younger and younger, there was a lot written about being rescued. But interestingly, a lot of research from that time identified that these young brides also had a fantasy or a notion of their new husbands dying young, and them being independent again soon.
That could be an echo from all the loss during the war, or a darker sentiment reflected in the trial?
There’s a lot to unpack from that time – it could be a whole other play.
If women were all trapped in a kitchen they were to some degree isolated from each other, very different from the workplace and war effort they’d been in. What were Shirley’s female relationships like?
I was, again, struck in her testimony, by what she said about being so embarrassed and ashamed of the arrangement with her boyfriend, that they were sleeping together, but not married, so much so that she had stopped seeing her friends and her mum. She wasn’t talking to her girlfriends. That must have been part of the madness. Nobody was telling her that she shouldn’t be being treated in the way that she was. She was trapped in the male generated idea, that women often still are in today, that it’s a man’s prerogative to wander. She’d lost her female network who could have helped her out earlier, or at least reflected back to her what women were actually thinking.
Will you be going back to acting or do you consider yourself a writer now?
I always thought I was going be a writer, and I feel like I accidentally got into drama school. And I loved it. I’ve had five years of really challenging and difficult theatre that pushed every part of me. I feel like I’ve fulfilled something, that I’ve achieved something, and it’s given me the freedom to feel happy to move on for a while. I went beyond what I thought I was capable of in my acting. I was so challenged by shows like Prima Facie, and I’m loving pushing myself in writing now. But I still consider myself an actor, and I’m dying to perform again, but at the moment writing is so fun for me.
A MODEL MURDER
4 – 25 JAN
Darlinghurst Courthouse 138 Oxford St Darlinghurst NSW 2010
$69 – $129
CAST
Shirley Beiger Sofia Nolan
Edith Beiger / Gill Blazey Best
Junee / Donny Maverick Newman
Arthur Griffith / Detective Blissett Ryan Morgan
Lyal Richardson Amber McMahon
Phillip Roach Anthony Taufa
Prosecutor Knight QC Marco Chiappi
Swing Gabbi Bolt
Arthur Cover Rob Johnson
CREATIVES
Story by Melanie Tait
Written and Directed by Sheridan Harbridge
Commissioned by Sydney Festival
Original Concept by Olivia Ansell
Dramaturg Rob Johnson
Musical Supervisor Glenn Moorhouse
Movement Director Vi Lam
Production & Costume Designer Michael Hankin
Lighting Designer Phoebe Pilcher
Sound Designer Zac Sarik
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