Belvoir’s 2025 Season

Belvoir has announced its 2025 Season, presenting nine plays including new Australian work, multi-layered and joyful Indigenous stories, some adaptations, a Shakespeare and some classics done the Belvoir way.

“Belvoir is a great big ongoing unfinished story made up of all the stories we tell, have ever told, and are yet to tell. Every new show adds to this gargantuan decades-long group-improvisation. It is a tale told by thousands. An epic hundreds of episodes long. Full of heroism and feats of daring. Ever-changing. Full of unexpectedness and happy accident. Belonging to everyone and no one. Turning good capitalist dollars into vanishing acts of theatricality. A river of life. A celebration. We’d love you to join us - again or for the first time - for another year of keeping the whole shebang going,” said Eamon Flack, Artistic Director.

 

JACKY

By Declan Furber Gillick

Directed by Mark Wilson

With Guy Simon, Greg Stone

16th January to 2nd February

A Melbourne Theatre Company production, Co-presented with Sydney Festival

Jacky’s a smart, enterprising young blackfella who has made a life for himself in Melbourne. He’s got the hang of the 21st century. Negotiating the gig economy? Slipping from office internships to cultural performances?

No probs. Sex work? Pays the bills. But when Jacky’s unemployable little brother Keith rolls into town, Jacky's various lives in the white world threaten to come undone.

Wink-of-the-eye smart and utterly of the here-and-now, this award-winning play of private life, work life, and that thing called ‘culture’ comes to Belvoir after its premiere season in Melbourne.

 

SONG OF FIRST DESIRE

By Andrew Bovell

Directed by Eamon Flack

With Kerry Fox, Borja Maestre, Jorge Muriel, Sarah Peirse

13th February to 23rd March

Camelia is losing her grip, lost between the past and the present as she passes her days in the garden of her Madrid home. Her children employ Alejandro, a Colombian migrant, to look after her. But this house isn’t what it seems, keeping the terrible secrets of history in its stones.

From Andrew Bovell (When the Rain Stops Falling, Things I Know to Be True) comes a new play of passion, history and politics, intimate in its detail and epic in its storytelling. Written for an acclaimed theatre collective in Madrid, where it premiered, in 2023, Jorge Muriel and Borja Maestre from that original cast to join Kerry Fox and Sarah Pierse for the English premiere.

 

BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY

5th to 27th April

By Dalara Williams

Directed by Ian Michael

With Bryn Chapman-Parish, Nic English, Stephanie Somerville, Megan Wilding, Dalara Williams

Redfern 1966.

Cheryl, Lulu and Queenie are young and life is glorious, full of hilarity and joy, even if jobs are precarious, the police harass them, and racism seeps into everything. But as they prepare for the biggest glam event of the year, the Deb Ball, their lives, Redfern, the country are all about to change.

A sharp and celebratory new play from Gumbaynggirr/Wiradjuri woman Dalara Williams, that pays respect to a generation that led the way, and to black women who won’t take a backward step.

 

THE WRONG GODS

3rd May to 1st June

Co-produced with Melbourne Theatre Company

By S. Shakthidharan

Directed by Hannah Goodwin & S. Shakthidharan

With Nadie Kammallaweera, Radhika Mudaliyar, Vaishnavi Suryaprakash

In a valley in India, paintings on a cave wall bear testimony to the presence of people - and their gods - for fifty thousand years. Close by, Nirmala farms the soil as her ancestors did, but her daughter Isha wants something more – an education, opportunity.

A new play from S. Shakthidharan (Counting and Cracking, The Jungle and the Sea) co-directed by Hannah Goodwin (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Never Closer), The Wrong Gods melds mother-and-daughter struggle with the economics of progress, asking, what are we worshipping? And what price will we pay?

 

THE SPARE ROOM

7th June to 13th July

Based on the Novel by Helen Garner

Directed by Eamon Flack

With Judy Davis, Elizabeth Alexander

In association with Byzant

When Helen’s old friend, Nicola, comes to town for treatment, it only makes sense she should stay in the spare room. Nicola has put her faith in a shady alternative cancer clinic, and Helen is determined to be her brilliant friend and carer no matter what. But as the sleepless nights rack up, a short stay in the spare room becomes a loving, maddening battle for life.

 

GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

26th July to 24th August

Based on the Novel by Max Porter

Adapted by Simon Phillips, Nick Schlieper & Toby Schmitz

Directed by Simon Phillips

With Toby Schmitz

Co-produced with Andrew Henry Presents

Two young boys fall back on their imaginations as they grapple with their mother’s sudden death. In the sadness, like a gothic Mary Poppins, comes ‘Crow’– trickster, babysitter, provocateur and healer. Did this odd bird come to a grieving family because they needed him? Or is he something they made?

Max Porter’s exquisite verse novel has been a literary sensation, garnering an ardent tribe of devotees. Now, in the hands of Simon Phillips – at Belvoir for the first time in 25 years – comes a fresh stage version full of theatricality and insight.

 

ORLANDO

30th August – 21st September

Based on the Novel by Virginia Woolf

Adapted by Carissa Licciardello & Elsie Yager

Directed by Carissa Licciardello

With Janet Anderson, Nyx Calder, Shannen Alyce Quan

Virginia Woolf’s most beloved and brilliant novel takes to the stage in a new adaptation. A bold new version of Woolf’s cheekiest, most brilliant creation from creators Elsie Yager and Carissa Licciardello (A Room of One’s Own, Scenes from the Climate Era).

Orlando is young, rich and handsome. A courtier in the time of Elizabeth, he sets out in search of love, life, and a fabulous destiny – but he has to travel through 400 years to find it. He dashes through time, from wars and revolutions to modernity – and as the world changes, so does Orlando. Who are they – woman? man? Or something which defies all the old orders?

 

 

MEOW MEOW’S THE RED SHOES

4th October to 9th November

By Meow Meow

In collaboration with Director Kate Champion

With Kimball Wong

Co-produced with Black Swan State Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre

From a chorus of hairy fawns to singing swans and showgirl stars, experience a frenetic song-and-dance into meaning. A musical celebration that will shock you out of stagnancy and into ecstatic oblivion.

The world-renowned creator behind Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl and Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid now urgently remedies The Red Shoes.

 

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KING LEAR AND HIS THREE DAUGHTERS

15th November to 4th January

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Eamon Flack

With Charlotte Friels, Colin Friels, Raj Labade, Charles Wu

Shakespeare’s greatest play, in an energised, classic Belvoir production, featuring Colin Friels.

It’s time to retire. Lear has a plan – he’ll divide the kingdom between his three daughters, they’ll work in harmony with each other, he’ll live with them, there will be a seamless transition of power, and all will be well.

The universe doesn’t work that way.

A play of what happens when the trappings of privilege, education, and civilisation are stripped away, and we have to look the human specimen square in the mirror.

Subscriptions for Belvoir’s 2025 season are on sale now via www.belvoir.com.au