Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney – When Helen Garner took her seat for opening night of Belvoir St Theatre’s stage adaptation of her award-winning 2008 novel The Spare Room, she wasn’t sure what to expect. The novel recounts, in unflinching detail, the three harrowing weeks Garner spent caring for her dying friend Nicola (“Nose”) Osborne in a spare bedroom at her Melbourne home. “They were the three worst weeks of my life,” Garner admitted in conversation with broadcaster Jennifer Byrne on June 16. “I came along feeling I would find it unbearable to live those weeks again.”
In the days since, Garner has emerged from the experience renewed. Seeing her own emotional ordeal played out on stage has brought unexpected relief—and reminded audiences why she remains one of Australia’s most fearless chroniclers of human frailty and friendship.
Opening Night Nerves and Unexpected Release
Garner arrived at Belvoir last Wednesday with trepidation. “I thought it was going to be gruesome,” she confessed, noting that the first act, depicting Nicola’s initial arrival and gradual decline, includes painfully honest scenes of failing health, botched treatments, and caregiver frustration. After the performance, however, she crawled into bed and slept—unprecedented in her later years—for nine uninterrupted hours. “Seeing those three weeks played out resolved something in me,” she said.
“I don’t sleep very well now, since I got old,” she added, “but I got into bed and slept without moving for nine hours.”
Adapting a Personal Trauma for the Stage
Eamon Flack, Belvoir’s artistic director and the play’s adaptor, described the challenge of translating Garner’s spare, close-up third-person narration into an immersive theatrical event. “Helen’s novel is a masterclass in emotional restraint,” he said. “Our task was to honor her frankness about medicos, misery and mercy, while creating space on stage for two powerhouse performers—Judy Davis as Helen and Elizabeth Alexander as Nicola—to inhabit the emotional extremes of friendship and end-of-life care.”
Flack reported extensive consultations with Garner, though the author insisted on minimal involvement. “I’m happy to hand stuff over,” she explained. “I wouldn’t have wanted to have anything to do with this production. I would feel that I was useless.” Yet Flack credits Garner’s openness with spurring a faithful yet theatrical retelling. “Helen trusted us with her story,” he said. “That trust is evident in every scene.”
Friendship, Rage and Mercy in The Spare Room
Garner’s novel—and, by extension, the play—resists the saccharine impulses of many illness narratives. As Nicola clings to dubious treatments and refuses to acknowledge her prognosis, Helen vacillates between tender caregiving and explosive anger. This tension resonated deeply with audiences, and with Garner herself.
“Nicole’s optimism made me furious,” Garner said. “When somebody’s in a trance of craziness, you want to snap them out of it—and that can make you cruel, harsh.” She recalled administering advice, pain-management resources and calls to palliative specialists, only to be met with her friend’s stubborn denial: “I’ll be fine,” Nicola would insist.
The stage magnifies this clash in scenes of exasperation and genuine grief. Theatrical director Flack notes that older men in particular criticized Garner’s original portrayal for its “too much anger.” “She was told, ‘Why are you so angry?’” Flack recalled. Garner has never shied from acknowledging her rage: “We rage against death,” she said. “There’s a lot of anger in us when death is in the room.”
A Theatrical Triumph: Judy Davis and Elizabeth Alexander
Central to The Spare Room’s impact is Judy Davis’s portrayal of Helen—a performance Garner found “shattering.” Davis brings a lithe physicality to the role: pacing, kneeling beside the bed, delivering monologues of frustration and sorrow with unblinking intensity. Across the room, Elizabeth Alexander inhabits Nicola with an aura of faded glamour and desperate hopefulness, trading vitamin-C injections and ozone-bath regimens for conventional palliative care.
Garner admitted she needed a moment to adjust to the actors’ “theatrical” gestures. “I don’t go to the theatre much any more,” she laughed. “I thought, ‘Could you stand still for a moment?’ But then I realised that theatre demands amplification. In film I’d never move so much, but on stage you have to fill the house.”
Critics and audience members alike have praised the production for its emotional truthfulness. One audience member told The Guardian that the play “brought me to tears, but also made me grateful for the power of honest storytelling.”
Reflecting on Past Adaptations and Future Projects
Although Garner tends to keep a distance from most adaptations of her work, she made an exception in the 1982 film of her debut novel, Monkey Grip. On set for a pivotal overdose scene, she intervened when she felt the performance strayed from her narrative’s intent. “Noni Hazelhurst said ‘Sorry, Nora,’ but I said, ‘Cut! That’s so wrong—Helen would be in a rage,’” Garner recalled with a grin. “I’m always glad I was there.”
Asked by Byrne whether she’d like to see more of her fiction staged, Garner demurred: “I’m telling you now, I would hate that. There’s so much shit in there. And when I die, don’t think anybody’s gonna get in it then, either.”
Yet this latest collaboration suggests that, given the right creative team and performers, Garner’s stories can find new life—and healing—in the theater.
Audience Reactions and Ongoing Conversations
Post-show discussions at Belvoir have been vigorous. Carers and those who have confronted illness have thanked Garner for her unsparing depiction of caregiver rage. One full-time carer approached her after a matinee: “Helen, we all feel that anger. We’re tormented by it. Don’t be ashamed. It’s part of the whole thing.”
Garner said these responses reassure her that The Spare Room’s candidness is its greatest strength. “No single woman has criticised The Spare Room for its anger,” she noted. “Instead, many older women thanked me for depicting the carer’s experience.”
A Million-Mile Journey Confronting Mortality
The Spare Room’s power lies in its refusal to sentimentalize death or caregiving. Garner’s narrative and Belvoir’s staging track a friendship broken, mended, and finally transcended by mercy. From the first scene of fresh sheets and spruced pillows to the final quiet moments by a hospital bed, the story compels audiences to reckon with mortality, autonomy, and the fierce love that can both bind and break us.
Garner, now in her early seventies, reflected on what it means to revisit that crucible of emotion more than a decade later. “I came out of the theater feeling resolved, as though I’d finally laid something to rest,” she said. “That’s what art can do. It can take your worst memories and make sense of them in a way you never imagined.”
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