A classic coming-of-age novel spurred this writer to 'blow up' her life - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Grace Chapple is an emerging Australian playwright, now based in London. (Supplied: Belvoir/Brett Boardman)

When Grace Chapple visited Florence, Italy, in 2022, she was listening to the audiobook of A Room with a View.

Travelling solo for the first time, aged 27, she found herself in the Uffizi Gallery — where Botticelli's The Birth of Venus hangs — feeling unsure what to do with her life.

"I was thinking, 'Do I even know who I am?'" Chapple says.

"You know that first time you're forced to confront yourself alone and how you interact with the world?"

As she wandered the city, a little hungover, so too did the protagonist of the novel: Lucy Honeychurch.

In English author EM Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View, Lucy visits Italy, chaperoned by her spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett.

There, she meets the charismatic but strange George Emerson and is wooed by another suitor, the wealthy but condescending Cecil Vyse.

It's the set-up for a love triangle, but Forster's novel was more than a romance; it's Lucy's coming-of-age story, which also pokes fun at turn-of-the-century English society.

That complexity spurred Chapple to adapt it for Sydney's Belvoir St Theatre, where it opens this month before travelling to Melbourne Theatre Company.

Listening to A Room with a View in Florence did more than inspire Chapple creatively. It encouraged her to "blow up" her life.

Returning to Sydney, where she had moved from Perth to study playwriting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Chapple broke up with her long-term boyfriend.

"When you're stuck on train tracks in life, you need something huge to shake you out of it," Chapple says.

That year, Chapple's debut play, Never Closer, set during the Troubles, premiered as part of Belvoir's independent 25A program. Two years later, it opened on the theatre's main stage.

Grace Chapple was working front-of-house at Belvoir when Never Closer premiered in 2022. (Supplied: Belvoir/Brett Boardman)

A new production from indie company Patalog Theatre will return to Melbourne this month, after earning rave reviews in May.

Never Closer is the story of five schoolfriends reuniting for Christmas Eve at Deidre's house in Northern Ireland in 1987.

Seeing each other a decade after they finished school, with many of them leaving Northern Ireland to work and study, unresolved tensions rise to the surface, especially after Niamh brings home her English fiancé Harry.

It was the play Chapple wrote while studying at NIDA.

She recalls being asked when she applied: "If you had a year left to live, what would you write about?"

She doesn't know why she burst into tears: "I just said, 'My mum'."

Chapple's mum grew up in Northern Ireland and moved to London at 17 to study medicine, where she met Chapple's dad, an Englishman.

"That became the base of the play," Chapple explains.

Chapple's mum loved Never Closer and was inspired to start writing too. (Supplied: Theatre company/Photographer)

"But it was mixed in with the fact I had just left home for the first time and was dealing with all these weird feelings about leaving behind my friends and my home and not knowing if there would be a home to go back to.

After members of the Belvoir team saw Never Closer during its 25A season, they wanted to know what Chapple was going to do next.

"They were keen to invest in me as an artist," she says.

"They said, 'What else do you have? Is there anything you want to adapt you might be able to turn around quicker than an original?'"

When she listened to A Room with a View earlier that year, Chapple had been struck by its theatricality.

With buy-in from Never Closer director Hannah Goodwin, Chapple pitched the adaptation to Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack.

"At first glance it feels like a quite conventional period romance … but the romance is really a vehicle for talking about more exciting political and transgressive topics than we're used to getting out of your Jane Austens," she explains.

Nathalie Morris (Bump) stars as Lucy in Grace Chapple's adaptation of A Room with a View. (Supplied: Belvoir/Brett Boardman)

Chapple says A Room with a View resonates with a modern audience because Lucy is, like all young people, "learning to think for yourself in a world that is really trying to tell you how to think".

"It's about how dangerous it can be to a dominant culture when people start to break away and carve their own paths.

"It's a journey everyone has to go on of figuring out how to live honestly in this world and be true to the person you are and how much that can cost."

That question of cost is something Chapple is thinking about with her next project, her second original play, The Landlord, which will feature in Belvoir's 2027 season.

It reunites the writer with Goodwin and Never Closer star Ariadne Sgouros (High Country) and breaks down intergenerational inequality in a story set across two Surry Hill terraces. Both are owned by 65-year-old John — but only one is falling apart.

Chapple started writing The Landlord in 2024, when she was on a research trip to Cambridge University to pore over its archive of Forster's manuscripts and diaries for her A Room with a View.

Eamon Flack describes Grace Chapple's The Landlord, starring Ariadne Sgouros, as "cut-glass sharp". (Supplied: Belvoir/Daniel Boud)

"[The Landlord] is born out of just all the dehumanising experiences that come from being a renter," she says.

It's a subject many millennial artists are grappling with in their work.

"Every conversation I've had since I moved to Sydney works its way back to the housing crisis eventually," Chapple says.

"Like, someone's got a shitty rental situation or they're getting kicked out or they're paying too much or they're trying to buy and can't."

While it's the subject on everyone's lips, not everyone has Chapple's expertise.

She's approaching the subject armed with a degree in economics.

"I was taught the narratives that are constructed around capitalism that protect it and make it seem like this perfect, inevitable thing," she says.

"I liked the idea of unpicking the narratives I was taught, but for people who didn't study it."

A Room with a View is at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, from October 3 - November 1 and Melbourne Theatre Company from November 14 - December 19.

Never Closer is at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, from October 15 - November 1.

The Landlord is at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, from September 25 - October 24, 2027.