Song of First Desire

Two plays by Australia’s Andrew Bovell were produced in Madrid before he wrote this third to premiere in Spain. Remarkably, it’s about the legacy of Spain’s brutal civil war and the decades of silence that followed, the Pact of Forgetting, under which the victor, Nationalist dictator General Franco went on to murder a further 150,000 Republicans.

It seems presumptuous to write about another country’s national horrors – after all, we  have our own “pact of forgetting” about Indigenous bereavement. But in the new democracy after Franco’s death, the Spanish still stayed silent about their generational pain. Now they’re finally unearthing the bodies.

On Mel Page’s stage of dark soil, edged with new green growth and littered with dry leaves looking like bones, we meet the seemingly demented Carmelia (Sarah Peirse) and her adult twins, the embittered daughter Julia (Kerry Fox) and the frustrated teacher Carlos (Jorge Muriel, who in Madrid translated Bovell’s plays).  All three have eyes for the handsome émigré from Columbia, Alejandro (Borja Maestre, also from Madrid) recruited to care for the mother.

Then we’re back to 1968, to another widowed mother of twins – yes, it gets complicated – Margarita (also Peirse), who stalks the house where lives the nationalist couple who in the war adopted the baby daughter she was forced at gunpoint to relinquish.  The other twin, Juan (Maestro), escapes in 1968 to Columbia …

These double twins, all estranged, make sharp metaphors for the formerly irreconcilable two visions of Spain, Catholic and conservative or progressive and European. Bovell’s narrative from historic to contemporary is compelling and heart-rendering, if leaning finally into the melodramatic.  Some story tangents are extraneous but other threads go deeper, like the ongoing desperation of today’s twins for the love and touch of Alejandro, and Kerry Fox’s bigoted nationalist in 1968 facing up to her murderous, incestuous husband (Muriel) and to Margarita.  

All four actors play two roles, which sometimes confuses.  Sarah Peirse is outstanding as the two tragic mother figures, she’s the emotional touchstone of the play, a fearless and totally unmannered actor.

Fox is nicely nauseous as both the curt fascist mother and the relentless bitch daughter, and Maestre and Muriel ground their characters and the play with Spanish truth and place.  Director Neil Armfield brings his characteristic eye for detail and human frailty to this world, and Morgan Morrissey’s lighting and composer Clemence Williams add focus and drama to Bovell’s fine play.

It unravels slightly into sentimentality by the end, remembering the words of the murdered poet Frederica Garcia Lorca which began the play. Song of First Desire is the title of a Lorca work, written when so many Spanish artists were beginning to blossom a century ago.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman.