The Balnaves Foundation Support Belvoir
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A I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect. Václav Havel B From the Artistic Director 4 It’s Been 30 Years 6 UPSTAIRS Radiance 10 2015 Kill the Messenger 12 Elektra / Orestes 14 The Wizard of Oz 16 Mother Courage and Her Children 18 Seventeen 20 Season Ivanov 22 Mortido 24 DOWNSTAIRS Blue Wizard 28 Samson 30 The Dog / The Cat 32 La Traviata 34 THE BUSINESS END Subscribe 36 Why You Should Subscribe 39 Prizes For Early Subscribers 41 Benefits 42 Loyalty Program & 30-Down Club 43 How to Book Your Subscription 44 Sunday Forum 46 General Information (including Box Office hours and performance times) 47 Thank You 52 2015 Season Calendars 54 Subscription Booking Form We need theatre. To reflect on ourselves – on what it tickets, building sets, making is to be human and what it is to be season books, schmoozing part of a society. A mature culture donors, inspiring children, sewing needs places where this reflection costumes, rigging lights, booking happens, places we can return to, flights, pouring drinks or writing to see ourselves on stage. plays. In my time as Artistic Director I have been so wonderfully Theatre is one of the oldest art supported by these people in forms. The natural human desire to realising my artistic ambitions. perform and to mimic one another, to frighten and be frightened, to I have been enormously proud of cry, to laugh, to think, is something the burst of creative energy that that we must have been doing has accompanied my time here from the very first moment that as Artistic Director. I feel a new we developed language. It generation of artists has really seems strangely paradoxical that blossomed and that we’ll be seeing theatre is both ancient and yet the fruits of that labour for many fleeting. Theatre only exists in the years to come on stages here and air between the audience and around the world. the performer, in those electric This is the last season I’ll curate as moments in which the play is taking the Artistic Director of Belvoir. And place. Then it retreats immediately I’ve saved the best till last. This into memory. The sites we perform season is a corker. A lot of the work in and watch from, whether they’re that we’ve done in these five years carved into a hillside in Delphi or are commissioning and developing new in an old tomato sauce factory in plays has borne fruit for 2015. We Surry Hills, become special places also have an Australian classic and in the collective memory of our newly re-imagined classic works culture. Belvoir St Theatre is one of from some of the finest directors in those places, and I’ve been lucky this country. enough to be a custodian of its two stages for five years. It’s a place of So go on, sign up! I won’t say high emotion – joy, sadness, fear goodbye right now because there’s – and it’s a site that over the last a whole year yet to play out, but 30 years has become very dear to I will say THANK YOU. You can’t this city. make theatre without an audience, and our subscribers are the most Belvoir is of course more than incredibly brave and loyal group you a pair of wonderful stages. It is could possibly hope to perform for. a great group of people. Every one of them is a true believer Let’s do it one more time. and passionate about making theatre, whether they’re selling Ralph x 4 Ralph Myers It’s Been 30 Years 2015 is a special year for us of theatre in Sydney forever. The There were just two productions After more than 10,000 nights in here at Belvoir. It marks 30 years unstoppable commitment of in that very first season of 1985. A our theatre on two stages across since our first season in 1985 – Sue, Chris and all those original fusion of music, mime, dance and more than 300 productions and three decades of a joyous shareholders to this building as a drama, the one-act musical Ha Ha created by hundreds of writers, and terrifying roller-coaster vital art space was quite simply an Ha Performing Humans opened in directors, actors and every other ride on two humble stages in act of love for theatre, for theatre- March, directed by Richard Lawton. kind of theatre-maker there is, with a theatre that started life as a makers past and present, and for Then Patrick White’s Signal Driver, countless lines of dialogue, tens of tomato sauce factory. We owe our city. under the direction of Neil Armfield thousands of entrances and exits, the ride to a momentous act (who was to become Belvoir’s first hundreds of kisses, buckets of And we’re still here. Thirty years the year before that very first Artistic Director in 1994), opened tears and about a zillion gallons of later. season; one that saved the in May featuring John Gaden and (mostly) fake blood, we’re still here building, our home known as David Marr sums it up so well in Kerry Walker in the lead roles of doing it night after night. Belvoir St Theatre. our book 25 Belvoir Street when Theo and Ivy Vokes. Signal Driver Upstairs and Downstairs. Everyone he says: ‘Belvoir is so Sydney. It’s only got off the ground after months Over a single weekend in 1984 remembers their favourite Belvoir hard to see how time, place, money of desperate fundraising – Neil was two ex-Nimrod workers Sue Hill moments; everyone who has and talent could come together so selling shares in the production and Chris Westwood managed to walked through our front door in the perfectly anywhere but in this town just to raise enough money to start pull off what was, really, nothing last 30 years can tell you the bits to sustain a little company with no rehearsals before a sponsor came short of a theatrical miracle. Their they’ve loved and the bits they’ve ideological axes to grind, one that’s on board and kicked in the balance. Pied Piper-esque feat of rallying- 30loathed – the heated post-show highly theatrical but looks beyond everyone-they-knew-to-throw-in-a- We no longer have to fund each debates into the wee hours at the theatre, worldly but childlike, thousand-bucks-each-to-save-the- production by selling shares (though bar attest to this. But it’s never dull. chasing all its theatrical ambitions – building-from-being-redeveloped- some days it still feels a bit like that!) And we love it. And we often do it black, white, foreign, gay, straight, into-just-another-piece-of-faceless- and we’ve steadily grown year-on- for love, not money. It is art, after all. feminine, masculine, new, old – with inner-city-real-estate had an impact year into a theatre company well the same hope of giving delight.’ Here’s to another 30 years. so great that it changed the nature loved and respected both around the country and around the globe. See you in the foyer! 6 Matthew Whittet7 Upstairs 8 9 3 JANUARY – 8 FEBRUARY UPSTAIRS By Louis Nowra Lighting Designer Indigenous Theatre at Director Leah Purcell Damien Cooper Belvoir supported by Set & Costume Designer With Leah Purcell The Balnaves Foundation Dale Ferguson Shari Sebbens Miranda Tapsell Radiance Louis Nowra’s Radiance is an exuberant black sabbath for three great Indigenous dames. It begins conventionally enough: Mae, Nona and Cressy gather at the old Queenslander in the tropics for Mum’s funeral. But these three sisters are forces of nature, and they haven’t been in the same room for years, and years. It isn’t long before that old house can’t contain the joy and pain of them all being together again… Radiance began its life at Belvoir in 1993. After 22 years, Nowra’s feat of playwriting – almost Shakespearean, a Tempest-like packet of lust, rage, grief and high-flying foolery – is ready to be unleashed again. Leah Purcell is the woman for the job. Purcell is a powerhouse. She burst onto the national stage nearly two decades ago and is as full of fight and life as she ever was. What better idea than for this all-round theatre elder to direct herself in this mighty little classic? Leah Purcell 11 14 FEBRUARY – 8 MARCH UPSTAIRS By Nakkiah Lui Set Designer Indigenous Theatre at Director Anthea Williams Ralph Myers Belvoir supported by With Nakkiah Lui The Balnaves Foundation Kill the Messenger Kill the Messenger is a funny Then in 2012 Nakkiah’s and shocking tell-all from a true grandmother fell through the maverick. unmended floor of her public housing home and died. Nakkiah In 2011 Gamilaroi/Torres found herself at the centre of a Strait Islander playwright/law story about... institutionalised student/performer Nakkiah racism. The resulting play lays it Lui started writing a play for all out – her dodgy sex life, a dead Belvoir. It was based on a true man’s second chance, and a story about a man in her home granddaughter’s sense of duty. suburb of Mount Druitt. One day, in unbearable pain due to Cunningly composed rage is one undiagnosed stomach cancer, he of theatre’s great modes. Kill the went to the local hospital, where Messenger is an exemplary case he was refused care. Then he in point. Anthea Williams (Forget went to a nearby park and hung Me Not) directs the incomparable himself.