More joy, more play, more panache, more love, more wild leaps of imagination, more possibility. More life. Belvoir’s Artistic Director Eamon Flack has unveiled an optimistic and wildly entertaining season of plays for the company’s 2017 Season.
There are inventive new plays from Australia and around the world, there are return seasons and tours of popular plays and two of our favourite stage actors in two great classics. Flack has reunited his award-winning team from his 2014 sell out hit The Glass Menagerie to find the same freshness and beauty in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. Pamela Rabe stars as the fierce mother Helene Alving.
Toby Schmitz returns to the Belvoir stage, after a three year absence, in The Rover by Aphra Behn. Schmitz takes the swashbuckling titular role in this raucous and outrageous battle of the sexes from the woman widely considered the first professional female playwright.
“Our 2016 Season has been very much about reflecting on our past, both for Belvoir and in a wider cultural sense,” says Flack. “With the 2017 Season we are taking an imaginative leap into the future. In this season, characters dream big in the midst of disaster and confusion. They fight passionately for a brighter future. This is a season of plays that unleashes the possibility that maybe the 21st century won’t be an unmitigated disaster.”
Two of the most inventive and exciting plays out of New York in recent years are Hir by Taylor Mac and Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns, a Post-Electric Play, and they are both in the 2017 Season. Anthea Williams directs Helen Thomson and Greg Stone in Hir, a play that turns the notion of the American family drama entirely on its head. Mr Burns examines how societies create myths in way that is thoroughly inventive way that is wildly entertaining.
Belvoir are thrilled to present brand new works from Lally Katz (Atlantis), Tommy Murphy (Mark Colvin’s Kidney) and Alana Valentine with Ursula Yovich (Barbara and the Camp Dogs). All three bold plays with intriguing and compelling women as their lead characters.
Audiences will delight in the opportunity to see two of Belvoir’s biggest recent hits back on stage: Jasper Jones and The Dog / The Cat in short Upstairs seasons. Late night comedy returns to Belvoir with Tom Ballard’s takedown of Australia’s asylum seeker policies, Boundless Plains to Share, while the hit of the 2015 Brisbane Festival, La Boite Theatre Company’s Prize Fighter, will be presented to Sydney audiences for the first time.
Downstairs at Belvoir will feature two shows from New Zealand, Indian Ink Theatre Company’s virtuosic show Guru of Chai, and Trick of the Light’s enchanting family show The Bookbinder. Currently playing to critical acclaim in Melbourne, ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s production of Katie Beckett’s Which Way Home, will also be presented downstairs.
Subscriptions are now on sale. For more information, visit: www.belvoir.com.au for details.
Image: Ralph McCubbin Howell in the Bookbinder – photo by Stephen Coulter