2012 Season at Belvoir

Artistic Director Ralph Myers announced the 2012 Belvoir season on Friday September 9.

“I’m enormously pleased that audiences have responded so enthusiastically to the 2011 season,” said Myers. “So in 2012 we have kept the recipe intact: a mix of exciting plays by local playwrights and classic plays re-imagined by the best and most original directors we could find.”

So now it comes to Myers to direct his first play at Belvoir, the classic comedy of manners, Private Lives, by the witty and delightful Noël Coward, starring the delicious Toby Schmitz in a role that could have been written for him.

The season kicks off in January with three shows presented in association with Sydney Festival: Buried City, co-produced with Urban Theatre Projects, in the Upstairs Theatre, I’m Your Man, an inventive production from Roslyn Oades in our Downstairs Theatre, and Simon Stone’s production for The Hayloft Project, Thyestes, at CarriageWorks, which played a sold-out season at Malthouse Melbourne in 2010.

Following the great success of The Wild Duck and Neighbourhood Watch, Stone will also adapt and direct Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude with Emily Barclay and Mitchell Butel. He will then direct Arthur Miller’s masterpiece Death of a Salesman with Colin Friels and Genevive Lemon as the Lowmans.

Benedict Andrews (The Seagull, Measure for Measure, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) returns to Belvoir direct his own play Every Breath starring Eloise Mignon and Dylan Young. Every Breath is one of 10 new Australian plays in the 2012 Season, including Rita Kalnejais’ dark comedy Babyteeth, directed by Eamon Flack (The End) and Beautiful One Day, an investigative piece about Palm Island devised by Belvoir, Ilbijerri Theatre Company and version 1.0. After the sell-out success of Human Interest Story, Lucy Guerin returns with Conversation Piece, the culmination of the collaboration between Lucy Guerin Inc and Belvoir.

Joining I’m Your Man in the Downstairs Theatre are four more new Australian plays. Old Man by Matthew Whittet, directed by Anthea Williams, Food by Steve Rogers, who will co-direct with Kate Champion from Force Majeure, a new version of Medea adapted by Kate Mulvany and Anne-Louise Sarks, and Eamon Flack and Leah Purcell will adapt Ruby Langford Ginibi’s iconic Don’t Take Your Love to Town for the stage.

This is a season of new adventures, classics rediscovered and reinvented, and a few unexpected surprises along the way.

Belvoir’s 2012 Season features 10 new Australian works. Ralph Myers will direct this first play since his appointment as Artistic Director.

www.belvoir.com.au

UPSTAIRS

Thyestes

15 January – 19 February at CarriageWorks.

It is the most infamous of all the ancients – the story of the deposed king whose sons were slaughtered and served to him by his brother in a feast.

The Hayloft Project stunned audiences with this brilliant re-imagining at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in 2010. Their starting point: THESE MYTHS ARE REAL. The action of the show, much like our lives, takes place in the banalities and ordinarinesses between atrocities.

Sydney Festival and Belvoir head to CarriageWorks with this dangerously smart excavation of our ancient urges towards love and destruction.

Thyestes contains nudity, strong sexual themes, violent references and very coarse language. It is not recommended for people under 18.

Buried City

6 January – 5 February

Belvoir and Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) have joined forces for this big-picture show about a city and society redefining itself by Raimondo Cortese.

Late one night in the gutted façade of a building primed for redevelopment, a group of security workers, labourers, and a local teenager find themselves haunting the same territory. One by one they rule a line in the sand, and by dawn they’re set for a showdown over who builds the future and who gets to own it.

Buried City is an ambitious new work about ever-changing cities like, well, Sydney – where waves of immigrants make new lives on old land. Director Alicia Talbot’s investigation of real-time action and filmic panorama continues in this special collaboration between Belvoir and Bankstown-based UTP.

Babyteeth

11 February – 18 March

Time for a comedy – a mad, gorgeous, bittersweet comedy about how good it is not to be dead yet.

A group of more or less ordinary Sydneysiders go about their lives: Anna makes toast, Henry dresses for work, Milla catches the train to school, Moses deals drugs – that kind of thing. But hovering above this unholy parade of life is the sobering fact that Milla will die before her 15th birthday.

Young playwright Rita Kalnejais looks at the humdrum world around us and sees something radically alive. Dogs, Paganini, figs, an eight-year-old Vietnamese violin prodigy, morphine, clear skies and a Latvian immigrant are amongst the magnificent conflagration of ingredients which make up this wonderful, funny play. Written specially for Belvoir, its theme is what Rita calls the violent sweetness of life.

Every Breath

24 March – 29 April

Benedict Andrews has turned his hand to playwriting.

A family under threat – from what, we don’t know – hires a young security guard, Chris. He spends long hours, day and night, by the pool, watching. One by one, in their private universes of plate glass and good food, each family member is drawn to Chris. A dangerous game of fantasy and privilege begins.

Strange Interlude

5 May – 17 June

Three decades before he wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill wrote a sprawling and adventurous masterpiece the likes of which Broadway had never seen.

Twenty-year-old Nina Leeds has lost the love of her life in the war. Overcome with grief, she quits university, falls out with her father and moves away from home. What follows is a breathtaking journey through 25 years in Nina’s life, as she pursues a series of sexual flings to console herself, eventually settles down in a comfortable but unexciting marriage with Sam Evans, then begins a 15-year affair with his best friend Ned Darrell.

In the vein of his 2011 rewrite of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Simon Stone creates a contemporary version of this truly amazing Pulitzer Prize winner.

Death of a Salesman

23 June – 12 August

Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?

Willy Loman is feeling his age. He and his wife Linda are struggling to make their mortgage repayments. The company he works for is branching out in new directions and it looks like he’s about to be left behind. When his university drop-out son, Biff, moves back home after years of drifting, old tensions rise to the surface.

Arguably the greatest play of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about a man refusing to let go of the false dreams we were all once promised.

Returning to our corner stage after an absence of 30 years, Colin Friels tackles the role of a lifetime in Simon Stone’s take on this timeless masterpiece.

Conversation Piece

25 August – 23 September

In every show we strive to be breathtakingly original. Choreographer Lucy Guerin’s new show for Belvoir takes this to an extreme by striving to be breathtakingly original every night.

A group of actors and dancers meet on stage and begin the show with a short conversation about... Well, we don’t know yet. Each night it will be a different conversation – just an ordinary preshow chat like you might have yourselves – and this short conversation will form the basis of the rather surprising performance that follows.

The project began as a simple experiment: what happens when you put three dancers and three actors together in a room? The result is both a cultural encounter between two art forms, and a kind of x-ray of the surprising hugeness that lies beneath our daily chitchat.

A co-production with Lucy Guerin Inc

Private Lives

29 September – 11 November

AMANDA: Darling, I believe you’re talking nonsense. ELYOT: So is everyone else in the long run. Let’s be superficial and pity the poor Philosophers. Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school-children. Let’s savour the delight of the moment. Come and kiss me, darling, before your body rots, and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.

Amanda has just married Victor and gone on her honeymoon. Elyot has just married Sybil and gone on his honeymoon. To the same hotel. Elyot and Amanda are about to find out all over again why they got divorced in the first place.

The censors did their best to ban the play when Coward wrote it in 1930 (as a vehicle for himself) and it has been refusing to behave for 80 years now. Its wit is definitive, its plotting almost perfect, and its critique of modernity dazzling.

Beautiful One Day

17 November – 23 December

Palm Island. An Aboriginal man is arrested, allegedly for insulting a police officer. Within 90 minutes, he lies dead on the watchhouse floor, his liver cleaved in two. The community protests, the police station is torched. A Senior Sergeant stands trial for manslaughter but is acquitted. Questions are raised about manipulation of evidence and a court suppression order. A protestor, jailed for inciting a riot, is out on parole on condition that he speaks to no-one.

Beautiful One Day is a theatrical documentary made by a group of Australians (black and white) seeking to interpret these events against the full sweep of the island’s history. It seeks to grasp the ordinariness of brutality, charting the course of repression, resistance and racism but also the astonishing resilience of the people who call Palm Island home.

Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre Company (Jack Charles v The Crown) is a champion of Indigenous storytelling. version 1.0 (The Bougainville Photoplay Project, A Certain Maritime Incident) have turned tough, patient enquiry into an artform. Together with Belvoir they have set each other the task of trying to understand the horror of circumstance that we all find ourselves in.

DOWNSTAIRS

I’m Your Man

12 January – 5 February

The more you sweat, the less you bleed.

For 18 months theatre-maker Roslyn Oades and her trusty tape recorder followed a determined, young boxer from Bankstown through his preparations for a world-title fight. I’m Your Man is the story of who she and her tape recorder met along the way: past legends, up-and-comers and failed contenders whose lives have been irreversibly changed by the fight game.

This Sydney Festival, Downstairs Belvoir turns boxing gym: place of dreams, of glory, of a better life, where everyone wants to be special and only one thing is certain – that no matter how high you fly you will eventually lose. I’m Your Man is no ordinary slice-of-life. The actors wear earpieces and take their lines directly from the ringsides, gyms and dressing rooms of Oades’ recordings. This is fuelled-up, high-stakes, real-deal theatre.

I’m Your Man is the third of a trilogy by Oades about acts of bravery and the psychology of respect. Behind the thrilling, brutal sport lies a compelling tale of courage and its cost.

Food

26 April – 20 May

A country highway. A greasy takeaway joint. Two sisters. One of them left, one stayed behind. One chose chaos, the other control. One chose sex, the other – food. Enter Hakan Leventoglu, aka Hassan the Beautiful.

Kate Champion is riding the wave of a decade of brilliant work across theatre, opera and dance, notably with her celebrated company Force Majeure. Steve Rodgers is a theatrical marvel who writes and acts with equal aplomb.

Their work meets here within the classic architecture of great drama: feuding sisters, a charming man and the possibility of transformation. The sisters battle it out, trying to make sense of who they were, who they are and whether they can ever allow each other to be something else.

A co-production with Force Majeure

Old Man

7 June – 1 July

Daniel wakes up. Something is missing. The phone is not working, and the kids’ toys are not in their usual spot under the television. In fact, his wife and children seem to have disappeared.

Old Man is Matt Whittet’s extraordinary play about fathers and sons, love and loss, kindness and Newtown. It is a beautiful and shockingly simple tale in two parts, which asks if it is possible to wake up one day and make good-enough better.

Anthea Williams is an exciting young director who has been forging a career at the Bush Theatre in London.

Medea

11 October – 25 November

Two young children on a stage play games to distract themselves. Off-stage and unheard their parents are having a very famous showdown. At some inevitable moment in the next hour the children will be drawn away from their games and into their parents’ bitter argument. From there they will enter mythology as the most tragic siblings of all time.

Made specially for the Downstairs Theatre, Anne-Louise Sarks’ refocusing of Medea is an examination of the collateral damage of one of history’s most famous family breakdowns. It is to Euripides’ Medea what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet: a behind-the-scenes look at the lives that minor characters live before the plot takes over.

Don’t Take Your Love to Town

29 November – 23 December

You can think of me as Ruby Wagtail Big Noise Anderson Rangi Ando Heifer Andy Langford.

Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town is one of Australia’s great and abiding books. Everything and nothing happens – from the small to the absolute, from the simple to the diabolical. Spanning most of the last century, from Coonabarabran to Surry Hills, it is the chronicle of a life. And Ruby’s is one hell of a life.

Leah Purcell directs this one-woman show which attempts something a little bit glorious: to relive Ruby’s big and soulful 70-something years in an evening. 

Images: Ralph Myers, Kate Box, Elouise Mignon, Emily Barclay, Colin Friels, Toby Schmitz, Megan Holloway, Leah Purcell. Photographer: Michael Corridore

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Other 2012 Sydney Seasons

Ensemble Theatre - Link

Griffin Theatre Company - Link