One hour and 15 minutes in, and the audience is readying itself. The moment we’ve been driving towards is imminent. Justine Clarke has just covered her blonde locks in a bobbed red wig; the jacket is on. It might be called Julia, but what Joanna Murray-Smith’s play has had its sights on all this time is The Speech.

It’s been a little over a decade since former Australian PM Julia Gillard’s withering, virtuosic, supremely argued comeback thundered across the parliament floor, across Australia and (soon after) across the world. Her ad libbed response to then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s question time chicanery is in the feminist history books, shorthanded by those defiant three words: I will not.

After years of copping sexist abuse as our country’s first female PM, with no accountability by those who should know better, and much of the denigration fuelled by government’s standards-setting top dogs, she’d had enough.

That speech was the culminating fulmination against all the personal misogynist attacks she had stoically borne. It was a ground-breaking moment in our politics and society. And Clarke delivers it brilliantly.