The Sapphires began as a stage play before becoming one of Australia’s favourite movies, and now it’s heading somewhere in between, with a one-off live reading of the screenplay on Saturday afternoon featuring most of the key cast.
Deborah Mailman, Miranda Tapsell and Shari Sebbens – three-quarters of the 1960s singing group at the centre of the story – will be among the actors taking part in a live table read at the Sofitel (Jessica Mauboy and the film’s Irish star Chris O’Dowd won’t be there, but Hunter Page-Lochard, Kylie Belling, Greg Fryer and Bert La Bonte will be).
Writer Tony Briggs and actor Miranda Tapsell will be joined by a host of other members of The Sapphires cast for a table read on Saturday. Credit: Joe Armao
Revisiting the material in this way, says its author Tony Briggs, is a way of laying bare the mechanics of a screenplay, to reveal what the bones of a production look like so that others might feel empowered to have a go themselves.
“It’s about inspiration, being able to follow what it is that your heart’s telling you to do as a creative, for the next generation,” he says. “I think it’s important for creatives to follow the heart.”
Briggs credits his aunt Hyllus Maris with providing him just such a spark when he was about 14. “She wrote a television series called Women of the Sun with Sonia Borg, which in the ’80s became a huge hit, and I asked her why, and I asked her how, and somewhere in that conversation I might have implied or asked her directly, ‘do you think I can do something like that?’ And she said, ‘If you want to do it, you just have to believe in yourself and do it’.”
It was the seed of something, though it took decades to germinate.
He made his way as an actor, but it was only when his mother started sharing snippets of her experiences as a singer entertaining the troops in Vietnam in 1968 that he felt he might have a story of his own worth telling. Even then, it took some good fortune to bring it forth.
Soon after he’d asked his mother for permission to try to shape her experiences into a play, he bumped into Kate Cherry, then chief executive of the Melbourne Theatre Company, at a birthday party. She asked him what he was up to. “And I said, ‘I’m thinking of writing something. I don’t know, though. I’ve never written anything’.”
A week later, he got a call from Simon Phillips, who was then the company’s artistic director. “He said, ‘I’d really love to talk to you about the play you’ve written’. I said, ‘what play?’ He said, ‘about the female singers’. ‘What female singers?’ And he went, ‘you know, about your mum in Vietnam’. Oh, yeah, that play.”
