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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.”
Briggs’ half-formed idea was ushered into Hard Lines, a program for new works set up by Julian Meyrick, and he was paired with Patricia Cornelius – “really, she was teaching me; it was a godsend” – and somehow from all that, a little piece of storytelling magic emerged.
The play was a hit, and the film it spawned drew a rapturous reception at Cannes in 2012, before going on to become a crossover hit, both locally (where it took $14.5 million, and was the year’s top Australian film) and abroad. It also marked the big-screen debuts of writer Briggs, director Wayne Blair and actors Sebbens and Tapsell. Next year, The Sapphires will return to the stage with a new Queensland Theatre Company production.
Briggs says he was “completely blown away” by the play’s instant connection with audiences, but having had “many years to think about it”, he now gets it.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Sapphires (from left): Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Miranda Tapsell and Shari Sebbens.Credit: Goalpost Pictures
“It’s about taking care of family, and I think that’s why it resonates with everybody, whether they’re Aboriginal or not Aboriginal,” he says. “At the core of it is human qualities that everybody can relate to – what makes us laugh, what makes us cry, what makes us bleed, what makes us hurt emotionally – all of that, it’s exactly the same. So I really wrote about that.”
The reading is being presented as an extension of the Birrarangga Film Festival, the biennial event (next edition 2026) founded by Briggs in 2019 and dedicated to First Nations storytelling from around the world. And if it goes well, he hopes it might be the start of a series.
“What I want to do is sit down with the cast and just have a yarn with them afterwards, just a little Q and A, and get them to kind of reminisce, just to give a little insight about what was happening before this, what’s happening now, and in between, the realities we go through as creatives, as artists,” he says.
“It just gives a little bit of hope. This year has been particularly hard for our industry, and I just had a sense that this is a way to end the year really well.”
The Sapphires Live Table Read is at the Arthur Streeton Auditorium at the Sofitel, Saturday, November 29, at 4.30pm. Tickets: birrarangga.world
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