SONG OF FIRST DESIRE Comes to Belvoir St Theatre 

Belvoir will present the Australian premiere of Song of First Desire by the inimitable Andrew Bovell (Things I Know To Be True), which captivated Spanish audiences in 2023. This intimate play of passion, history and politics connects 1968 Spain with the present, uncovering familial secrets hidden across generations.

Directed by Neil Armfield (Keating! and Things I Know to Be True) who reunites with Bovell, the production will see Kerry Fox (Shallow Grave) and Sarah Peirse (Mark Colvin’s Kidney), joined by Borja Maestre and Jorge Muriel from the original cast in Madrid. 

Anchoring itself in three moments of Spanish history - 1943, 1968 and the present - Song of First Desire weaves a transgenerational portrait of the Spanish Franco years and the reclamation of memory and history. In a society where silence has been imposed and open discussion discouraged, a Colombian migrant is employed by her disenfranchised twins to care for the aging Camelia in her Madrid home. Lost in her memories, whilst grappling with the present, long held secrets begin to unravel, fracturing a family buried in their pain and the pain of their country.

Director, Neil Armfield said, “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”.

“One of the central themes in the play is how do we carry the past in our own times. As the world turns toward authoritarian governments to provide solutions to its problems Song of First Desire is a reminder of the traumatic legacy of fascism on a country and its people.,” said playwright Andrew Bovell. 

This play was created in collaboration with the Numero Uno Collective in Madrid and translated by Jorge Muriel, who features in the production.

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