As a teenager, Sheridan Harbridge heard ’80s Oz rock band The Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett singing the explicit I Touch Myself on ABC TV’s Rage. It was a revelation for the future actor and writer. “I grew up Christian Pentecostal,” she says via Zoom, “and we were banned from watching naughty things like Doctor Who and The Golden Girls. But mum didn’t ban Rage.”
Amphlett’s performance resonated deeply with Harbridge. “Later on, I saw her in [the musical] The Boy From Oz,” she recalls, “and knew that there was a myth and a love around her, but hadn’t yet identified the cultural impact she’d had. It’s only in the last few years that I really understood how important she was.”
Harbridge has dived into that importance while making a stage show called Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett. Before Amphlett died of cancer in 2013, she planned her own one-woman theatrical show, and now such a piece comes to life posthumously, thanks to Harbridge, director Sarah Goodes and musical director Glenn Moorhouse.
The show aims to address the dichotomy between Amphlett’s on-stage ferocity and the vulnerability behind the rock-star mask. Says Harbridge: “We try and really lean into that split of the monster she made – the girl in the school uniform, the mask she had to put on to survive that world and to make the music she wanted to make – and then the real woman behind it. It flips between those two worlds, and how they dangerously blurred into the same thing at one point, and the inevitable fallout of that.”
Just as Moorhouse has rearranged the songs so that, as Harbridge puts it “the music lives much more in a theatre space”, she plays Amphlett without trying to imitate her. “One of my first instincts was that to try and be her could only ever be disappointing,” she says. “Everyone’s memory of her is so much better than what anyone could conjure.” Instead she tries to build the world in which she made what Harbridge refers to as “her hurricane”.
In researching her show, Harbridge was surprised by how often Amphlett was questioned about her authenticity. “Australia’s rock scene in the late ’80s had this obsession with authenticity that was so limiting,” she says. “Artists like Jimmy Barnes were always seen as authentic, whereas Chrissy curated what she called ‘the monster’. Even though it was what the fans loved, there was another element to it where journos were constantly asking, ‘But what is it? Is it real? Are you really that?’”
Harbridge observes that Amphlett was constantly attacked for having a public face. “I was really struck by how hard the fight was,” she says. “We see her in retrospect as this sort of feminist icon. She smashed through the glass ceiling, and I get to stand on her shoulders. I get to make the show, unquestioned. That’s not the path she trod. I think a lot about the artist she might have been if she had a different kind of freedom.”
Asked about the “exquisite” in the show’s title, Harbridge replies, “I think the fight crushed her on many occasions. But when she learned how to put her rage on stage – when she starts to realise that being absolutely naughty is the key to her soaring – I think the rage becomes exquisite.”
She starts the story with Amphlett wanting to make this show. At one point, the singer was apparently going to play a character – another mask – that was initially a cat, and then a crow, because she was so wary of just being herself. Harbridge says that whereas Amphlett didn’t know how to write a theatre show in which she was a crow, she does, and wanted to give the late singer that gift.
New work that she’s helped create has been the mainstay of Harbridge’s acting career, the towering exception being her Blanche in the Old Fitz’s 2023 A Streetcar Named Desire. “I find that [new work] far more exciting than feeling like a gun for hire,” she says. “When you’re writing it, you spend two, three, four years in a story, and go through the torture of trying to honour that story in its best way. The torture is worse, but the payoff is far more intriguing to me. If I’m telling other women’s stories, I want to go all the way into how that woman may have wanted it… We can’t have Chrissy sitting in the audience and saying, ‘Oh, that was shit.’ Chrissy has to really like this show. This is Chrissy’s journey as an artist, as a woman, in that time.”
Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett: Belvoir St Theatre, January 29-February 8.