Here’s what I really think.

Any society that calls itself a democracy but can’t make proper space for a genuinely thriving theatre of its own isn’t a real democracy.

We do real democracy at Belvoir*.

We gather together to celebrate what’s great (usually people) and get stuck into what’s not (inhumanity).

Real democracy means that people who don’t know each other and who live very different lives are prepared to gather together around all sorts of quandaries and predicaments (stories), both serious and silly (both comic and tragic) and hear each other out until we get to some kind of resolution.

That’s also what theatre does.

Theatre and democracy both mean getting a bit vulnerable with strangers. Rubbing shoulders with people whose worldviews might be the source of our own struggle or rage or hilarity. Hanging in there when it all gets a bit dramatic or ridiculous. Staying open to other ways of living and thinking and being. Taking the piss out of the powerful and the deluded. Bringing our leaders and elites back down to earth. Taking the time to get engaged with each other’s fears, foibles, yearnings.

They both mean celebrating and hearing out our differences, IRL, rather than letting billionaires addict us to outrage and lies in order to make themselves feel immortal.

Theatre is the opposite of the internet.

Theatre is AI proof.

Theatre is real.

Theatre is the pure model of democracy.

Australia needs more great theatre, more artistic licence, more of the joyful and sometimes hard work of holding many truths in one place among many people.

That’s the hopeful, hopeless, heart-on-our-sleeves wish that drives our work here.

That’s what led us to these great artists and great stories: Megan Wilding’s rom-com of colonisation. Noni Hazlehurst and the ghosts of our cities. Geraldine Hakewill in David Adjmi’s brilliant 13 x Tony Award winner about love and music. Tom Wright and Margaret Thanos’s whip smart rethink of Anthony Burgess’s prophetic A Clockwork Orange. Robyn Nevin and Zahra Newman searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe under the direction of Australian theatre’s greatest showman Simon Phillips. Abbie-lee Lewis going gloriously rogue with her debut play Dirty Diamonds. Sanaz Toossi’s liberated, liberating tale of five women in Iran. Grace Chapple and Hannah Goodwin’s third collaboration at Belvoir after Never Closer and A Room with a View, this time getting verrry close to home with The Landlord. And one of the greatest plays of the last fifty years, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, for no other reason than its pure theatrical brilliance and love of life.

Some of these names may be new to you, but that’s the thing I’m proudest of with this season – the artists of the future stepping up for the first time, the plays and stories taking their place because they deserve it, not ‘cause they’re known brands.

This is a season of generations and generation – growth, passing on, many ages of life and culture, the many great stories that lie just out of sight.

And, as always, a rousing celebration of life.

LONG LIVE BELVOIR

Eamon Flack
Artistic Director

*Well, we do our best. Democracy isn’t perfect.