Composed by Dr Jane Hammond

Libretto by Theresa Borg

Developed and Licensed by Monstrous Theatre

with the generous support of

Victorian Opera

Monash Performing Arts Centre

and Creative Australia

6th October 2025

Victorian Opera have today announced the World Premiere of The Spare Room with music by Dr Jane Hammond and libretto by Theresa Borg. Adapted from the book The Spare Room by Helen Garner.

The Spare Room will have its World Premiere at Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, in October 2026.

"My novel The Spare Room was inspired by the worst weeks of my life: when I cared for a beloved friend who had terminal cancer. In her terror of dying, she had fallen prey to a charlatan, a so-called ‘healer’, who swindled her out of thousands of dollars and subjected her to meaningless, excruciating treatments. Of all my books it has had the broadest reach outside Australia: it has been translated into a dozen languages. Of the many readers who have responded to it, an overwhelming number spoke with personal emotion about the helpless rage and love that can possess a person in that particular caring role. I was very taken aback when several critics (all of them, I noticed, men of my generation or older) reproached me for the anger that runs through the book. Many, many women who confessed to having experienced that rage spoke of it in a whisper, as if it were illegitimate, or shameful.

When I sat down with Theresa Borg to discuss her wish to adapt the book, I was moved by the depth of her understanding of it. She had immediately grasped the meaning—and the legitimacy—of the rage that flows under the narrator’s pained love for her dying friend. She recognised in it an existential suffering that in no way negated the sincerity of the loving service and care. 

Listening to her, I realised that a psychological knot such as this would be absolutely at home in an archetypal musical form like opera.

This is why I’ve handed the book over to Theresa Borg and Jane Hammond. I’m prepared to trust them to create a form rich enough to convey tender affection and laughter as well as the wildness of grief and anger and loss." 

Helen Garner