A century ago, that movement made poor girls feel rich, lighting up their hair, their dresses, and their prospects. It also lit a fuse that would burn through their bones, their trust in authority, and the legal foundations of workplace safety.
From March 20 – March 28, 2026, Wyong Drama Group brings D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls to Tuggerah. A gripping piece of historical fiction based on the true story of the women who were poisoned for profit, fought back against the corporate industrial class, and forced the world to see that radium was not a miracle cure, but a slow and silent killer.
Director Daryl Kirkness first encountered the script when Wyong Drama Group announced it for their 2026 season and held a play reading. Several members pressed the script into his hands.
With over 45 years in theatre as an acclaimed director, designer and producer, Kirkness is known for projects that fuse strong visuals with social bite.
From the Great South Land Reconciliation Project, Australian and world premieres of popular shows such as Tapestry and Paris, to major musicals including Chicago, We Will Rock You and Priscilla for Gosford Musical Society, and Spamalot for Wyong Drama Group.
For Radium Girls, that team begins with composer Andrew Worboys, fresh from the national tour of Here You Come Again as Musical Director.
Worboys created the original score for Wyong Drama Group’s sell-out production of Dracula and returns with a new soundtrack tailored to this specific production. Around him is a creative cohort.
Anna Carter, Debbi Clarke, Ben Hudson, Amber Markham, Cameron Mitchell and Clayton Williamson, whose combined credits span companies across the Central Coast, Sydney and beyond, including professional and overseas work.
At the centre of the story are the Radium Girls themselves: Courtney-Jade Buckley as Grace Fryer, Yasmin Ling as Kathryn Schaub and Rhiannon Power as Irene Rudolf. In history, Grace, Kathryn and Irene were young women at the U.S. Radium plant in Orange, New Jersey.
As co-workers began to die in their teens and twenties, jaws crumbling, bones weakening, tumours forming, Grace left the factory and later developed osteonecrosis of the jaw, a rare condition where jawbone tissue dies and becomes exposed.
With no warning from her employers and unaware of a suppressed scientific report that linked radium to her illness, she decided to fight.
Grace’s struggle drew in lawyers, advocates and the press. Using the power of the fourth estate, she helped turn private suffering into public outrage, forcing regulators and courts to acknowledge that radium had killed the women whose bodies still glowed.
The resulting case changed industrial safety law and radiation standards worldwide, protections that still shape workplaces today.
Onstage, Buckley, Ling and Power channel that history into three distinct but intertwined performances: women who begin as workers with bright futures and become, unwillingly, evidence that cannot be ignored.
Opposite them stand the men who, despite vastly different intentions, sit on the other side of the power ledger: Raif Colbert Smith as company president Arthur Roeder, Marc Calwell as company lawyer Edward Markley and others, Reuben Harris as plant manager Charlie B. Lee, and Andy Kabanoff as Dr Sabin von Sochocky, the chemist who helped popularise radium and later tried to warn of its dangers.
Together, they explore the many faces of the corporate industrial class: the fearful manager, the loyal lawyer, the ambitious entrepreneur, the conflicted scientist. None of them are moustache-twirling villains; all of them are implicated in a system that took the women’s lives for granted in the name of progress and profit.
This ensemble cast is rounded out with several Central Coast favourites and some outstanding newcomers.
