Belvoir Season 2017

Belvoir’s Artistic Director Eamon Flack has unveiled the company’s 2017 Season. There are new plays from Australia and around the world, return seasons and tours of popular plays and two of Belvoir’s favourite actors in two classics.

Toby Schmitz returns to the Belvoir stage, after a three year absence, in The Rover by Aphra Behn. Schmitz takes the swashbuckling titular role in this raucous and outrageous battle of the sexes from the woman widely considered the first professional female playwright.

Flack has reunited his team from his 2014 production of The Glass Menagerie in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Pamela Rabe stars as the fierce mother Helene Alving.

‘Our 2016 Season has been very much about reflecting on our past, both for Belvoir and in a wider cultural sense,’ says Flack. ‘With the 2017 Season we are taking an imaginative leap into the future. In this season, characters dream big in the midst of disaster and confusion. They fight passionately for a brighter future. This is a season of plays that unleashes the possibility that maybe the 21st century won’t be an unmitigated disaster.’

From New York come Hir by Taylor Mac and Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns, a Post-Electric Play. Anthea Williams directs Helen Thomson and Greg Stone in Hir, a play that turns the notion of the American family drama entirely on its head. Mr Burns examines how societies create myths.

Also included are brand new works from Lally Katz (Atlantis), Tommy Murphy (Mark Colvin’s Kidney) and Alana Valentine with Ursula Yovich (Barbara and the Camp Dogs). All three bold plays with intriguing and compelling women as their lead characters.

Two recent hits return: Jasper Jones and The Dog / The Cat in short Upstairs seasons, while La Boite Theatre Company’s Prize Fighter will be seen by Sydney audiences for the first time.

Latenight comedy returns to Belvoir with Tom Ballard’s takedown of Australia’s asylum seeker policies, Boundless Plains to Share.

Downstairs there will be two shows from New Zealand, Indian Ink Theatre Company’s Guru of Chai, and Trick of the Light’s family show The Bookbinder. Also Downstairs is ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s production of Katie Beckett’s playwriting debut Which Way Home.

Prize Fighter

By Future D. Fidel

Director: Todd MacDonald

Upstairs Theatre - January 6 – 22

A La Boite Theatre Company & Brisbane Festival production presented in association with Sydney Festival

Future D. Fidel’s Prize Fighter tells a story similar to his own, of Isa, a Congolese boy who comes to Australia as a refugee escaping a brutal civil war and unspeakable horrors. Settling in Brisbane, he finds a passion and discipline in boxing.

In this physical production the theatre becomes a boxing ring. As Isa fights for the title, he is besieged by traumatic memories and must battle his past as much as his opponent.

Pacharo Mzembe (Gwen in Purgatory) returns to Belvoir as Isa, in this production which was nominated for Best Play and Best New Australian Work at the 2016 Helpmann Awards.

Image: Prize Fighter - Gideon Mzembe & Pacharo Mzembe by Dylan Evans.

Which Way Home

By Katie Beckett

Downstairs Theatre – January 11 – 29

An ILBIJERRI Theatre Company production in association with Belvoir &
Sydney Festival

Tash is on a road trip, going back to country with her dad. He is getting older and the time is right for the trip, and maybe there are a few things she is getting away from too.

Tash and her dad are really close. After her mother died, Tash was raised by her dad, away from country and in a mostly white suburb, where they forged a tight bond. Which Way Home is a work of fiction, but Beckett was also raised by her much-loved father after the death of her mother.

Writer Katie Beckett is joined on stage by Tony Briggs(Cleverman, ABC1)

Which Way Home offers an affirming perspective on a father-daughter relationship in an Indigenous family.

Image: Which Way Home - Katie Beckett by Brett Boardman

Tom Ballard – Boundless Plains to Share

January 13 – 15 – Latenight Upstairs

In 2015 comedian and broadcaster Tom Ballard set out to examine Australia’s asylum seeker and immigration policies. He interviewed refugees, explored the history of the White Australia Policy and met with controversial former Immigration Minister Peter Reith.

Ballard won the 2016 Helpmann Award for Best Comedy Performer.

Boundless Plains to Share is a comedy lecture about the history, cost and future of ‘border protection’ and just what the national anthem is on about with those ‘boundless plains to share’.

Jasper Jones.

Based on the novel by Craig Silvey, adapted by Kate Mulvany.

January 25 – February 19.

Charlie’s 13 and smart. Perhaps too smart. But when blamed-for-everything Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie’s out of his depth. Jasper has stumbled upon a terrible crime in the scrub nearby, and he knows he’s the first suspect – that goes with the colour of his skin. He needs every ounce of Charlie’s bookish brain if the truth is to emerge before the town turns on Jasper.

As the boys negotiate the secrets of a small town, the winds of change blow But how do teenage Australians solve the riddles of a changing world? You gotta get brave.

Tom Conroy, Matilda Ridgway and Guy Simon return in Anne-Louise Sarks’ production.

Image: Jasper Jones - Matilda Ridgway and Tom Conroy by Lisa

The Dog / The Cat

The Dog by Brendan Cowell

The Cat by Lally Katz


Upstairs – April 13 – 30.

After four extension weeks in the Downstairs Theatre in 2015, The Dog / The Cat returns on the Upstairs stage for everyone to get in on the magic.

It’s the quintessential Sydney story of sex, heartbreak, love, and dogs in a park, in fact, it could be called Two Men, One Woman, a Park and a Dog – because everyone knows that nothing breaks the ice like a cute dog. Brendan Cowell’s (Ruben Guthrie, The Sublime) play The Dog paints a not-so-flattering portrait of the tricky line between mateship and romance, and of the insatiable appetite of Jack Russell terriers for the most disgusting things they can find.

Owning a cat is not easy. Co-owning a cat with your ex is less easy. Co-owning a smart- talking, irritable and meddling cat with your ex is pure comedy. Lally Katz(Back at the Dojo, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person) brings her trademark charm and surreal humor to The Cat.

Mark Colvin’s Kidney

By Tommy Murphy

Upstairs Theatre – February 25 – April 2.

Australian woman Mary-Ellen Field was a successful business advisor in London when she was accused of being an alcoholic and leaking private information to the press, destroying her career in the process.

Several years later when it’s discovered that journalists and investigators from Rupert Murdoch’s News International have been hacking the phones of celebrities and other people of interest, Mary-Ellen sets out to prove that this was the source of the leaked information.

Meanwhile in Australia, veteran journalist Mark Colvinis covering the phone hacking story and reaches out to Mary-Ellen after hearing her interviewed. An unlikely friendship ensues and when Mary-Ellen learns of Mark’s medical condition she becomes set on a donation that offers them both a kind of salvation.

Mary-Ellen is played by Helpmann Award-winning actor Sarah Peirse.

Director David Berthold (Artistic Director of Brisbane Festival) returns to Sydney to direct this new play by Tommy Murphy following their collaboration on Holding the Man.

Image: Mark Colvins Kidney - Sarah Peirse by Daniel Boud

Guru of Chai

By Jacob Rajan & Justin Lewis

Downstairs – May 16 – June 4.

An Indian Ink Theatre Company production

Guru (Jacob Rajan) is a buck-toothed chameleon, channeling 17 characters and leaping to multiple locations, delivering a serpentine romantic thriller while dispensing dubious spiritual wisdom. He is by turns charming, loathsome and absurdly profound. Laughter, heartbreak and enlightenment abound.

Loosely based on the Indian fairytale Punchkin, Guru of Chai tells the story of a tea-seller whose life is changed forever when an abandoned girl stops a busy train station with the beauty of her singing.

Indian Ink Theatre Company is one of New Zealand’s most successful theatre companies. It is a partnership between Rajan and Justin Lewiswho have been collaborating since 1997. They blend western theatrical traditions with eastern flavours and have been critically acclaimed for their use of live music, heightened theatricality, humour, pathos and great storytelling.

Mr Burns – A Post-Electric Play

Writer Anne Washburn. Score by Michael Friedman. Lyrics by Anne Washburn

Upstairs Theatre

May 19 – June 25

Co-production with State Theatre Company of SA

A catastrophe has brought the civilised world to an end. Survivors huddle around a fire, pondering the world without electricity, and the things they will never see again. To console themselves, they piece together an episode of The Simpsons, clinging to one of the few memories they all share.

Fast forward seven years and we’re in a post-apocalyptic society. A troupe of players wander the land, providing connection with a mythic past – by playing out the classic Simpsons episodes: Springfield has become a Golden Age.

Fast forward a generation. A feudal world of sorts has sprung from the ruins, and at its core is an intense religion of musical theatre, featuring a pantheon of strangely recognisable four fingered, yellow gods.

Director Imara Savage, along with a cast of music theatre idols including Mitchell Butel (The Government Inspector), Esther Hannaford (Little Shop of Horrors, Luckiest Productions) and Brent Hill (Little Shop of Horrors, Luckiest Productions) bring this production to Adelaide, then Upstairs at Belvoir for this post-apocalyptic Simpsons musical extravaganza.

Image: Mr Burns - Mitchell Butel by Daniel Boud

The Rover

By Aphra Benn

Upstairs – July 1 – August 6.

Lost in a maze of masquerade and revelry, a ratbaggy gang of exiled cavaliers plunge into the steamy depths of Spanish occupied Naples at carnival-time. They fall into the usual traps of thwarted love and mistaken identity while causing merry havoc across the town.

They are led in their debauchery by Willmore (Toby Schmitz),the eponymous Rover,
who was thought to be inspired by the infamous John Wilmot, a notorious playboy of
the seventeenth century. He’s beyond rakish, but appears to have met his match is the beguiling and witty Hellena (Nikki Shiels). Shame she’s a nun. Meanwhile Angelica Bianca, the most glorious courtesan in Europe has fallen hard for Willmore and is set on revenge for his romantic betrayal.

Aphra Behn is widely considered the first woman to make a successful career from playwriting. When The Rover premiered in 1677, it was an absolute sensation. The play fell out of favour for a few centuries, considered a little too coarse for polite society, but was rediscovered in the 1980s and is now considered one of the great ‘battle of the sexes’ comedies.

Eamon Flack directs.

Hir

By Taylor Mac

Upstairs – August 12 – September 10

Hir is the new play from American playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac, best known for judys exuberant and outlandish drag performances.

Isaac has come home from the blood and horror of Afghanistan to look after his sick Dad, Arnold, only to find a family home that looks like a bomb has gone off. And, in a way, that’s just what’s happened. It turns out his younger sibling, Max, is transgender, his Mum, Paige, is out from under the thumb of her domineering and violent husband, and they’re both out to smash the Patriarchy.

Arnold has been incapacitated by a stroke, and Paige is exacting revenge for years of abuse by humiliating him. She is force feeding him estrogen and dressing him as a wild drag clown. The confluence of Arnold’s incapacity and Max’s coming out has led Paige into a kind of radical feminism that sees her refusing to clean the house as an act of de ance.

Hir follows directly from a long history of American playwriting about the family in disarray, and while it is bitingly contemporary it sits rmly in this milieu of naturalism in extremis. A ghoulish vaudeville of the declining American middle-class.

Hir is directed by Belvoir’s Associate Director - New Projects Anthea Williams (Kill the Messenger, Forget Me Not) and stars Helen Thomson (Ivanov, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll) as Paige and Greg Stone (Hamlet, The Government Inspector) as Arnold.

Image: Hir - Helen Thomson by Daniel Boud

Ghosts

By Henrik Ibsen

Upstairs – Sep 16 – Oct 22

For Ghosts, Eamon Flack has reunited his creative team from his award-winning 2014 production of The Glass Menagerie: set designer Michael Hankin, costume designer Mel Page, and composer and sound designer Stefan Gregory. They are also rejoined by Pamela Rabe as Helene Alving, a ferocious mother trying to create a better future for her son.

Following the death of her wealthy and influential husband, Helene Alving gives away his fortune in an attempt to protect her son, Oswald, from inheriting anything from his father who was abusive and unfaithful. But when Oswald returns from living in Paris it becomes all too painfully clear that his father’s misdeeds have left Oswald with a desperately dif cult legacy.

Rabe will be joined by an incandescent cast including Tom Conroy (Jasper Jones, Mortido), Taylor Ferguson (Miss Julie) and Robert Menzies (A Christmas Carol, The End).

The Bookbinder

By Ralph McCubbin Howell, based on a story by Ralph McCubbin Howell & Hannah Smith

Downstairs Theatre – September 26 – October 8

A Trick of the Light production

Ralph McCubbin Howellis a bookbinder. He’s looking for a new apprentice. His previous apprentices have not lasted long. See the best bookbinders are illiterate, otherwise they might get lost in a good book, or even worse, a bad one.

Blending narrative, shadow puppetry and music, The Bookbinder is especially scheduled for the September school holidays.

New Zealand company Trick of the Light have been making award-winning shows for worldwide audiences since 2011. They make theatre that is playful, inventive, thought- provoking, and that speaks to the here and now.

Suitable for ages 9 and up!

Image: Bookbinder - Ralph McCubbin Howell by Stephen Coulter

Atlantis

By Lally Katz


Upstairs Theatre – October 28 – November 26

In her charming one woman, autobiographical play Stories I Want to Tell You in Person, Lally Katzrecounted a childhood story of being newly arrived in Australia from the States, and her new playmates being horrified at her very American declaration that she loved herself. In her new play Atlantis, Katz takes self exploration to a whole new level.

Lally is on a journey that many women will recognise. She’s seeking a more innocent and hopeful time in her life by going back the land of her childhood. Her personal relationships are disastrous, her career is in a shambles, she’s fast running out of money and everyone she encounters seems to be a charlatan or a shyster.

Something is pulling her back to Miami. Is it a mythical city under the waves?

Five women play the myriad characters: ageing Jewish grandparents, wizened taxi drivers, cynical prophets, unhappy pharmacists, clowns, hip-hop artistes, narcissists, angels, animals – and, of course, Lally herself in an exploration in the struggles faced by women today.

Rosemary Myers (Artistic Director of Windmill Theatre Company) directs Atlantis with regular collaborators, set and costume designer Jonathan Oxlade and actor Amber McMahon (Twelfth Night or What You Will, Angels in America). Also playing Lally are Paula Arundell (Mother Courage and Her Children, Peter Pan) and Lucia Mastrantone (Twelfth Night or What You Will, The Book of Everything).

Barbara and the Camp Dogs

Writers Ursula Yovich & Alana Valentine

Songs by Alana Valentine, Ursula Yovich & Adam Ventoura


Upstairs Theatre – December 2 – 24.

Produced in association with 
Vicki Gordon Music Productions Pty Ltd

Meet Barbara (Ursula Yovich) and her band the Camp Dogs. Barbara’s been trying to make it in Sydney but maybe this just isn’t her town. In all the relentless demands of city life, where’s the sense of belonging she craves? It’s time to take a break with her cousin Ren (Casey Donovan).

Donovan captured our attention when she was just 16 and won Australian Idol. She has since starred in Belvoir shows (The Sapphires, As You Like It), written a memoir, and has most recently been seen on stage in the Queen musical We Will Rock You.

The multi-talented Yovich is best known to Belvoir audiences as an actor (A Christmas Carol, Yibiyung, The Small Poppies), but she is also a musician and songwriter. She has partnered with playwright Alana Valentine (Parramatta Girls) to create a down and dirty rock gig filled with theatricality.

Image: Barbara and the Camp Dogs - Ursula Yovich by Daniel Boud