2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012 We are excited to announce Belvoir’s 2013 Season. It’s about growing up, or not. About taking chances and attempting to right wrongs. It’s about finding your place in a messy, chaotic world. Ralph Myers kicks off the year with Peter Pan, a work for adults and children alike with a team of fabulous clowns and headed by the funny/dangerous Meyne Wyatt as the boy who wouldn’t grow up. Next up is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Tenessee Williams classic directed by Simon Stone and heralding the long overdue return of Jacqueline McKenzie, who long-term Belvoir audiences will remember for her ethereal Ophelia back in 1994. Speaking of Hamlet, we thought it was time to tackle that great play again, this time Simon Stone directs Toby Schmitz in the title role. Audiences loved Anthea William’s moving production of Old Man in the Downstairs Theatre this year; in 2013 she’s moving Upstairs directing Forget Me Not by Tom Holloway. This will be followed by both parts of Angels in America. It’s a piece of such breadth and ambition that it commands two nights in the theatre and we’re thrilled to have Eamon Flack to direct. Adena Jacobs is a young director of great talent from Melbourne. Her company staged a stunning adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona last year and we loved it so much we had to bring it to Sydney to show you. Leticia Caceres and are a formidable director/actor team (The Dark Room, 2011). They are teaming up with Simon Stone as writer to bring us a brand new take on Miss Julie. Our year in the Upstairs Theatre finishes up with another collaboration with our friends at ILBIJERRI Theatre Company. Corranderrk is a story that is both inspirational and heartbreaking; Isaac Drandic directs. The Downstairs Theatre will once again play host to some of the best new Australian writing around. We are thrilled that two of our associate playwrights will have new works showing in the space. They are This Heaven by Nakkiah Lui, directed by Griffin’s new Artistic Director Lee Lewis, and Small and Tired, written and directed by Kit Brookman. Both are significant talents that you’ll be seeing more of. If you’ve ever heard Lally Katz speaking about her work you’ve probably wanted to see her on stage as a performer! That’s just what we’ve done in Things I Want to Tell You In Person. Ros Horin has spent the last 18 months with an extraordinary group of African women who now call Australia home. Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe is their story. The year finishes up Downstairs with Yirra Yarkin’s Kyle Morrison directing The Cake Man, one of the classics of early Indigenous playwriting and still brimming with life. Upstairs Peter Pan Everybody knows Peter Pan. He’s the boy who hasn’t 5 January – 10 February grown up in 113 years. But one night not long ago we sat Upstairs down and read J. M. Barrie’s original play and we found By J.M. Barrie ourselves in the presence of something far stranger, Director Ralph Myers far wilder and far more brilliant than Disney ever let us Set Designer Robert Cousins believe. Costume Designer Alice Babidge This is the story of a strange boy who comes through the Lighting Designer Damien Cooper window of an ordinary family and takes the children on Composer & Sound Designer an adventure to the bush. Well, to Neverland. It is also Stefan Gregory a mad festival of bedtime and storytime, of uncatchable Dramaturg Tommy Murphy girls who have a thing for you and Lost Boys who don’t have a thing for you, of rip tides, pirates, ticking crocs, With growing up, going home, mothers, fathers, dogs, dreams, Charlie Garber and that mad pirate fiend and great big grown-up Captain Geraldine Hakewill Hook! Meyne Wyatt John Leary It also happens to be more or less impossible to stage Meyne Wyatt at Belvoir, which is precisely why Ralph Myers is putting it on. For how better to un-grow Dan Wyllie up than attempt something that really shouldn’t be attempted? To top it all off, a cast of the country’s most ridiculous actors are along for the ride. Meyne Wyatt knocked our socks off earlier this year in Buried City and we can’t wait to see what he does with the cheeky boy who wouldn’t grow up. Dan Wyllie will bring something altogether new to Captain Hook and John Leary and Charlie Garber will be joined by more of Sydney’s naughtiest theatre-makers as Lost Boys, mermaids and crocodiles. Parents, bring your children. Children, bring your parents. Grandparents, bring everyone!

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof BRICK: But how in hell on earth do you 16 February – 7 April imagine that you’re going to have a child by a Upstairs man that can’t stand you? By Tennessee Williams MARGARET: That’s a problem that I will have Director Simon Stone to work out. Set Designer Robert Cousins Tennessee Williams is one of the giants of Costume Designer Alice Babidge twentieth-century drama and Cat on a Hot Lighting Designer Damien Cooper Tin Roof is his Lear. One era is ending, how Composer & Sound Designer does the next begin? It’s a portrait of two Stefan Gregory generations. One doesn’t want to die, and the other one feels crowded out, confused, and With desperate to inherit whatever it can get before it’s too late. Jacqueline McKenzie Big Daddy is a magnate. His son Brick is a closeted ex-footballer with a drinking problem. Brick’s wife Maggie is a second-rung society girl measuring her success against all the other families and the number of babies they have. Big Daddy is dying and somehow or other Maggie and Brick have to conceive the Jacqueline McKenzie next generation… Simon Stone’s Death of a Salesman was the standout hit of Belvoir’s 2012 Season. He continues his brilliant what-now exploration of the American classics with Tennessee Williams’ magnificent family showdown. The great Jacqui McKenzie (Hamlet) returns to Belvoir alongside the great Ewen Leslie (The Wild Duck).

Forget Me Not Gerry is almost 60, and he is going to meet 20 April – 19 May his mother for the first time since he was Upstairs three. His daughter Sally has had it up to By Tom Holloway here with him and his problems. The old Director Anthea Williams lady lives somewhere in the UK. Liverpool, according to the records. So Gerry is going With to Liverpool to find out what made him who Colin Moody he is. Tom Holloway’s (Love Me Tender) gem of a A co-commission Everyman and play started life as a conversation between Playhouse Theatres Belvoir and Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse Theatres. Holloway’s task was to tell the story of the 3000-odd English children who, between 1945 and 1968, were told they were orphans and sent to Australia on a promise of warmth, fresh air, abundant food and boundless opportunity. Instead they arrived to deprived institutions where neglect and abuse were the norm. Holloway hasn’t told this story from its outset Colin Moody half a century ago; he sets it here and now. He has written a series of raw, often achingly beautiful conversations between members of a scattered family. Drawing the whole thing together is Gerry’s extraordinary, precarious bid to finally learn what it means to love and belong to a family. Belvoir’s own Anthea Williams (Old Man) directs this exquisite portrait of a man on a journey to meet the mother he never knew.

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012

Angels in America: It ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century. New York Observer A Gay Fantasia on How long does it take for a play to become a classic? National Themes Actually, Angels in America is not one play but two. Millennium Approaches and Perestroika 28 May – 14 July were the closing statements of last century – an epic double-comedy of love and hate, Upstairs heaven and earth, past and future. Now, a generation after the play first appeared, a black By Tony Kushner President who supports gay marriage is about to go up against a Mormon Republican for the Director Eamon Flack White House, and Angels in America is the perfect guide to the essential questions of our Set Designer Michael Hankin times. Exactly what are the forces that drive the manic history of this new millennium? What Lighting Designer Niklas Pajanti does it really mean to live in a free society? What does it mean to live in a good society? Composer Alan John Eamon Flack (As You Like It, Babyteeth) directs a stellar cast in the newest classic in the canon. With Paula Arundell Mitchell Butel Part One: Millennium Luke Mullins Robyn Nevin Approaches Ashley Zukerman It could be one of those great New York Jewish jokes. It is 1985, Prior Walter is HIV positive, his Jewish boyfriend leaves him for a straight Mormon, and then he gets a hospital visit from an angel who says it is up to him to save humanity. And that is just part one.

Ashley Zukerman

Part Two: Perestroika The showdown. Various forces have gathered in New York: the ex-boyfriend and his Mormon squeeze, the squeeze’s pill-popping wife and Mormon mother a rabid Republican lawyer, a black nurse, and the Angel of America. And Prior Walter has the future of the world in his hands.

Robyn Nevin

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012

Persona Subtle, detailed and truthful, this 24 July – 18 August collaboration transfers the mystery Upstairs at the heart of Bergman’s film intact, Conceived by Adena Jacobs, while entirely remaking it. As I said, Dayna Morrissey & Danny Pettingill miraculous. Based on the film byIngmar Bergman Theatre Notes Director Adena Jacobs Adena Jacobs’ staging of Ingmar Translation Keith Bradfield Bergman’s film packed out houses at Production Designer Dayna Morrissey Melbourne’s Theatre Works in 2012. It was Lighting Designer Danny Pettingill one of the finest pieces of theatre in the Sound Designer Russell Goldsmith country all year. Elizabeth is an actress. One night, in the With middle of Elektra, she falls silent. Nervous Meredith Penman breakdown? Spiritual crisis? Illness? Daniel Schlusser Attention seeking? No-one can say. She Karen Sibbing is sent to the seaside to recover. As Elizabeth’s silence continues, her nurse Belvoir presents a Fraught Outfit Alma begins to speak and Bergman’s production signature themes kick into life: enigmatic acts of love and kindness, dangerous fraught outfit heights of obsession and need… Karen Sibbing Persona pulls off a remarkable feat: it recreates the famous intimacy of the great Bergman’s finest film on a stage. This is a consummate theatrical close-up about our basic human need to be seen and known by another person.

Miss Julie We love watching plays about couples tearing 24 August – 6 October each other to pieces: George and Martha in Upstairs Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Elyot and By Simon Stone Amanda in Private Lives, Jean and Julie in after August Strindberg Miss Julie. Director Leticia Cáceres The difference, though, is that Julie is still in her teens. She is rich because her father is With rich. Jean is not rich – he works for the family, Brendan Cowell in a lowly way – but he would quite like to be. They have this much in common: they would both like to rule their own lives, they both think they can get that from each other, and they both think sex is the way to do it. August Strindberg’s masterpiece has been hovering in the wings at Belvoir for a while now, waiting for the right people: Leticia Cáceres and Brendan Cowell (The Dark Room) both know how to combine tender and brutal to devastating effect. Simon Stone joins them with a rewrite of the play in the fashion of his The Wild Duck. Brendan Cowell This is a red-blooded new Miss Julie about men and power, about extreme privilege, about freedom, and about how cruel we can be to each other in the interests of self- preservation.

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012

Hamlet The play’s the thing… 12 October – 1 December Every generation feels the irresistible Upstairs compulsion to attempt to stage this, the By William Shakespeare greatest play by the greatest playwright. Director Simon Stone Then, when we try, we’re haunted by the Set Designer Ralph Myers ghosts of past Hamlets: Olivier, Gielgud… Costume Designer Mel Page Roxburgh. Every new production becomes a Composer & Sound Designer strange mirror of the play itself: a new Hamlet Stefan Gregory encounters the ghost of an old Hamlet and puts on a play in order to find out how to With really become Hamlet. It takes the perfect Emily Barclay combination of director and leading man to Robyn Nevin tackle this perennial conundrum – to face up Toby Schmitz to the ghosts and plunge into the thing itself with clear eyes. Director Simon Stone is ruthless and visionary in his pursuit of the essential in a text; Toby Schmitz is one of the great actors of his generation: quick, droll and fiendishly sharp. Hamlet is the natural next step in their theatrical partnership. They’ll be joined by Toby Schmitz a cast of masters, including the wonderful Robyn Nevin and Emily Barclay. IT’S TIME.

Coranderrk Coranderrk is about what might have been. 7 December – 5 January In the neglected storehouse of Australian Upstairs history, this is one of the definitive stories. By Andrea James & Giordano Nanni At a Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry Concept Giordano Nanni in 1881, the men and women of the Director Isaac Drandic Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve went Assistant Director Ralph Myers head-to-head with the Aboriginal Protection Board. Their goal was both simple and With revolutionary: to be allowed to continue the Jack Charles brilliant experiment in self-determination Tom Long they had pioneered for themselves on the Kelton Pell scrap of country left to them. Coranderrk recreates the Inquiry. This A co-production with ILBIJERRI is both great theatre and great history. It revives the voices of all those, black and white, who fought for a better compact between the country’s oldest and newest Indigenous theatre at Belvoir inhabitants – three dozen of them from supported by The Balnaves 132 years ago, speaking for themselves, Foundation directly to us, as though the question at hand remains unanswered today. Jack Charles This special co-production between Belvoir and ILBIJERRI pays tribute to the resilience and adaptability of a people who rose to the challenge despite the odds, appropriating the power of the written word to make their own voices ring loud and clear.

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012 Downstairs This Heaven Sometimes you need to push. 7 February – 3 March Sissy Gordon’s father died in custody at Downstairs Mount Druitt Police Station. The cops got a By Nakkiah Lui fine, Sissy’s family got $9000, and no-one is Director Lee Lewis allowed to speak about it. Sissy is about to become a lawyer but tonight lawyers and the With law are beside the point. Tonight the night is Travis Cardona dirty and heavy, and the moon is swollen and bright. Everyone knows that on nights like this things happen. Nakkiah Lui’s This Heaven is about a family who find themselves at a flash point of oppression, loss, love and anger. Lui turns the streets and parks of Mount Druitt into a fierce public forum where the essential matters of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad are up for grabs. At the centre of it is the question: does doing nothing make you as complicit as the perpetrators?

Travis Cardona Lui grew up in the Mount Druitt Aboriginal community. This Heaven is her first play. In the time she wrote it she was an associate playwright at Belvoir, she won the inaugural Dreaming Award, and finishing her law degree. This Heaven is about balancing worlds. This Heaven will be directed by newly appointed Griffin Artistic DirectorLee Lewis who has a formidable talent for nurturing new plays. Stories I Want to Tell You in Person There is no-one quite like her. 21 March – 14 April On the one hand, has been Downstairs Lally Katz writing the funniest and most original By Lally Katz plays in the country for the last decade – Director Anne-Louise Sarks Neighbourhood Watch, for example. On Set Designer Ralph Myers the other hand, Katz, Oscar Wilde-like, has been putting her genius into her life With and only her talent into her work. Now the Lally Katz inevitable moment has come when the two must collide. A co-production with Malthouse Theatre The thing is – and this is a true story – Katz was supposed to write us a play about a fortune teller. But she spent her commission (and then some) actually going to a fortune teller. In New York. More than once. This is the story of what Katz has been doing instead of writing a play. It features Katz, on her own, as herself, channelling the stories of the many psychics, alchemists and taxi drivers who have tried to show her the way.

Lally Katz Anyone who’s met her will know that the word ‘irrepressible’ has nothing on Katz, even at her quietest. She makes chaos charming and catastrophe positively exuberant. She likes to be laughed at, and her method is to talk first and think later. Anything could happen. Seriously. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN. It’s Lally Katz!

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012

The Baulkham Hills Yarrie Bangura grew up in a camp in Guinea. She is doing her HSC. Aminata Doumbia is African Ladies Troupe from Sierra Leone. She is an ambassador for 15 August – 8 September the UNHCR. Big Mama Rosemary Kariuki is Downstairs from Kenya. She is a community leader and she Writer & Director Ros Horin knows how to live. Yordy Haile-Michael grew Devisors & Performers up in an army. She has four kids and lives in Yarrie Bangura Lalor Park. They are one half of The Baulkham Aminatah Conteh Hills African Ladies Troupe and they would like Aminata Doumbia to welcome you into their worlds. Yordanos Haile-Michael In August on our Downstairs stage these Rosemary Kariuki marvellous women are going to turn their Tariro Mavondo extraordinary stories of survival into a joyous Effie Nkrumah theatre of humanity. But this is not just a show Dancers Tiana Canterbury about what’s happened to the ladies. With the Lisa Viola help of four other African women – singers and Movement Director dancers and actors – they are going to take this Lucia Mastrantone great opportunity to be who they want, say what Singer/Songwriter Aminata Doumbia they want, and become as amazing as they can. Musical Director Basil Hogios Yarrie Bangura This is how they celebrate a new beginning in a Video Designer Mic Gruchy land of refuge. Cinematographer Justine Kerrigan Producer Michelle Kotevski The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe is a celebration of women, human rights, laughter and resilience. With a bit of sage advice on A co-production hair care. with Racing Pulse Productions & Riverside

Small and Tired Orestes has come back to bury his father. 26 September – 20 October He has been away a long time. His mother Downstairs is hardened, his sister is strangely ill. He will Writer & Director Kit Brookman see them, he will bury his father, and then, Set & Costume Designer Mel Page in all likelihood, he will drift away again. But in a bar one night, slightly drunk, he meets a With gentle soul called Pylades… Tom Conroy Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired sets up a Luke Mullins brilliant moral challenge for its characters: to love in spite of all the shit. The play springs from the myth of Orestes and the House of Atreus, but Brookman’s brilliant leap of imagination has been to fully dissolve the myth into the contemporary world. The result is a small play which echoes large – about restlessness and modern love, about the rootlessness of the times, about the brokenness of our sense of family and humanity. At its heart is the startling idea that love is an ancient thing we have to learn and re-learn from generation to generation. Luke Mullins Brookman is an associate playwright at Belvoir, and his plays have something special going on: gentle, wise, oddly funny, very human and very smart. He wrote Small and Tired specially for Downstairs, and specially for the remarkable Luke Mullins. It is beautiful.

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

CORPORATE PARTNER 2013 season Embargoed to 8pm Friday 14 September 2012

The Cake Man Back in the early 1970s a group of pioneering 14 November – 8 December Indigenous theatre-makers occupied a Downstairs dilapidated terrace in Redfern and started the By Robert J. Merritt National Black Theatre. The first full-length play Director Kyle J. Morrison they staged was Robert J. Merritt’s The Cake Man. A droll examination of white paternalism With from a black point of view, Merritt’s play kicked Irma Woods off a renaissance of art and performance that laid the foundations of contemporary Indigenous A co-production with Yirra Yaakin theatre. Theatre Company The Cake Man is at once straightforward and complex. It is about the small details of life in a changing world. Jumping effortlessly from a pre-invasion idyll to the hard scrabble of modern life on a mission in western New South Wales, Merritt’s virtuosic play pings with closely observed portraits of people doing what they Indigenous theatre at Belvoir have to do to get by. Tucked away inside it is supported by The Balnaves an account of the roots of despair and of the Foundation beautiful means of overcoming it. Irma Woods Kyle J. Morrison is from the new generation of Black theatre. He is the Artistic Director of Perth’s Yirra Yaakin, and we are teaming up with his company to breathe new life into this forgotten gem. Robert J. Merritt watched his first opening night under police guard: he was an inmate of Long Bay at the time. The Cake Man is his real testimony.

For more information contact publicist Elly Michelle Clough [email protected] | 02 8396 6242 | 0407 163 921

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