SONG OF FIRST DESIRE

About the show

From the inimitable Andrew Bovell (When the Rain Stops Falling, Things I Know to Be True) comes a superb new play of passion, history and politics, intimate in its detail and epic in its storytelling. 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. As Alejandro’s presence begins to unlock the past, it shakes a family that has buried its pain – and its country’s – for too long. It’s an honour to take on Andrew’s new play, Song of First Desire. It’s five years since our collaboration on his marvellous Things I Know to Be True (my last production for Belvoir) and it’s thirteen years since we began work on a stage adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. Writing a play from Australia about the inheritance of fascism in Spain might seem to be a massive reach, but Andrew’s fractal poetics come from a place with its own history of forgetting, of silence, of lies erasing a shameful past. If Spain enacted its Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) to try to bury the heinous crimes committed under Franco, in Australia we didn’t need to – we already had the lie of Terra Nullius. – Neil Armfield This is a dazzling piece of writing. Set in 1968 and the present, it unpicks the instincts that drive individuals and whole societies towards fear and violence – and perhaps, also, reconciliation. Andrew wrote it with and for an acclaimed theatre collective in Madrid, where it premiered, in Spanish, in 2023. We’ve invited Jorge Muriel and Borja Maestre from that original cast to join the great Kerry Fox and Sarah Peirse for the English premiere. I think you can call it a must-see. – Eamon Flack