‘A Model Murder’: the 1954 trial that gripped Sydney takes to the stage

In 1954, when the 22-year-old Sydney model Shirley Beiger went on trial for the alleged murder of her live-in lover, hundreds of spectators, many of them women, queued outside Darlinghurst’s courthouse with sandwiches, Thermos flasks and even babies, hoping for a seat.

“They were yelling, ‘God bless you, Shirl,’” says the award-winning theatre maker Sheridan Harbridge. “They were fully behind her and what she’d done.”

The playwright and director is speaking to Guardian Australia while seated by the dock where Beiger stood trial 70 years ago. In January the courthouse will be the setting for A Model Murder, a theatrical recreation of the trial that draws on court transcripts. Audiences can buy tickets to sit in the public gallery or in the jury box.

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As Harbridge prepares the show for its premiere, she has been thinking about why Australian women became fixated on Beiger, a jobbing magazine model who was depicted in the media as softly spoken, naive and emotional. Beiger had appeared in several photoshoots in PIX, a weekly news magazine that specialised in “girl next door” types. Then, after she shot her 23-year-old boyfriend, Arthur Griffith, in the face with a .22 Browning repeater rifle, she became a sensation.

Harbridge believes Beiger may have tapped into an unspoken despair and frustration shared by women about their lives, in the years before the feminist wave of the 1970s. “[Griffith] becomes a symbol of all their grief as wives. They had been working during the war effort, they got to have a different life and taste a new world. Then the men came back from the war, and that shut down … the revolution hasn’t begun but the tendrils are [creeping in].”

Beiger shot Griffith on 9 August 1954. She had seen her lover take another woman into Chequers nightclub in Pitt Street. Distraught, she returned to her Kings Cross apartment and gathered up all of his belongings, including his golf clubs. She then took a rifle from a neighbour’s apartment and returned to the nightclub, driven by her mother.

Beiger told the court she had been sitting in the car’s backseat when the rifle fired. She claimed the gun had gone off because Griffith, putting his head through the window, had pushed her, “the way he always pushes me” – suggesting that there may have been a pattern of physical intimidation. “No one looked at it [back then] as assault. We look at it now and go, ‘Oh my god,’” says Harbridge. (Beiger already knew family violence; when she was a child, her father was fined for breaking her mother’s nose.)

Sofia Nolan, who plays Beiger in A Model Murder, sees elements of “emotional and mental manipulation” in Beiger and Griffith’s relationship, pointing to Beiger’s testimony that Griffith continued to see other women as a condition of them being together.

“It’s been challenging to pinpoint her state of mind,” she says. “I did come into it in the belief she killed Arthur in malice. Now, I’m not so sure. There is every possibility this was a terrible accident. Yes, she got the gun and put bullets in it, so there was some intention to threaten and frighten – but I don’t think she meant to [kill him].”

During the trial, the prosecutor persistently tried to paint Beiger as a bitter woman bent on revenge – attempts that Harbridge says are satirised in the play, among other comic flourishes.

So, who was Beiger? Harbridge describes her as a woman “between worlds”, aspiring to rise beyond her poor upbringing through modelling. Her father worked as a fellmonger, removing fur from animal carcasses; her mother ran a Redfern small goods shop (which she and Beiger lived above) but spent time in jail for running sly grog.

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Beiger left school at 14 and landed her first modelling job at 17 while working at a florist in David Jones. “There weren’t many career options open then to women,” says Margot Riley, curator of a PIX exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales, which includes Beiger’s 1951 cover shoot. “So, if you were a pretty girl, this was a way for you to earn a living. Shirley was quite young, and quite innocent.”

How an ostensibly “innocent” young woman came to be living in Kings Cross, renowned for Bohemians, crooks, sin and vice, is a bit of a puzzle. Maybe she wanted to be “where life is happening”, Harbridge speculates.

It was there that Beiger met Griffith, who worked as a clerk for his bookmaker father. Kathryn Bendall, who contributed research to the play, is perhaps more sympathetic to Griffith than Harbridge and Nolan; she describes him as “somewhat hapless, slightly naive, a bit of a Lothario” but says she never found any evidence of him being a serial womaniser. “I never had any sense there was any malevolence in his actions,” she adds.

The male-dominated press seemed to take Beiger’s side in their coverage of the trial, the Herald reporting sympathetically on her “soft, almost inaudible voice” and “sobs and great emotional strain”. Journalists described her daily court outfits and corn-coloured hair, cut in the latest “poodle” style.

The all-male jury took her side, too: after a couple of hours’ deliberation, they found Beiger not guilty of murder or manslaughter.

After the trial, Beiger disappeared from public view; there were rumours she had moved to Melbourne with her mother.

Harbridge is still mulling over her motivations. “Her reaction and behaviour – from the shooting to its aftermath – is so puzzling,” she says. “The police come and she’s almost spacey, [she says] ‘I shot him’ and just gives all the facts. There’s this state of almost catatonic shock to it.

“But even the way she goes and gets the gun – you try to imagine how it [happened]. Was it all in a frenzy, or was it just really calm and calculated? Her behaviour is quite mysterious. I think about her slowly isolating herself for 18 months in that relationship as someone who hasn’t spoken about [how] ‘this guy’s being a dick’, you know?”

All of which lends an anxious note to balancing dramatic choices around Beiger’s mindset. If she were alive today, Beiger would be 92. What would Harbridge say if she walked into the courtroom now? “I’d say ‘Sorry’ for making some of this a comedy,” she laughs. “She could be alive. If she had kids, they could very well have a ticket, which makes me very nervous.”

• A Model Murder is at Darlinghurst Courthouse 4-25 January as part of Sydney festival