Henry
Coming in 2025
To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of PLC in Melbourne I was commissioned to write a play about the writer and musician Henry Handel Richardson, who together with Dame Nellie Melba, Vida Goldstein and many other well-known women attended the school in the 1890s.
Henry Handel Richardson was a complex woman and although she lived a century ago she speaks to us today with a fresh and honest voice. Her family story was unlike other PLC girls of her era, as a country girl whose father had died and whose mother worked to pay her school fees. Her youthful struggles are beautifully fictionalised in The Getting of Wisdom, and her later life in her memoir, Myself when Young. Her dry sense of humour, incredible work ethic and Australian sensibility came through in everything she wrote.
I hope that I’ve done her justice, and can’t wait to see PLC students perform Henry in 2025 for the 150th anniversary of the school.
