A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

Eamon Flack

Eamon Flack is the Artistic Director of Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney. He is a director, writer, dramaturg and script developer for stage and screen.

 Eamon was born in Singapore and grew up in Singapore, Darwin, Cootamundra and Brisbane. He has a BA (English and History) from the University of Queensland, and trained as an actor at WAAPA from 2001 to 2003. He has worked around Australia and internationally, from the Tiwi Islands to Sri Lanka and the UK. He has led Belvoir’s new work development in various guises since 2006, and has commissioned and developed many of the company’s most acclaimed new works over the last 15 years.

His productions of The Glass Menagerie, Angels in America and Counting and Cracking won the Helpmann Awards for Best Play in 2015, 2016, and 2019. 

His key directing credits include: Counting and Cracking (with Associate Director S. Shakthidharan, winner of the Helpmann Award for Best Direction of a Play and nominated for the Sydney Theatre Award Best Direction of the Mainstage Production), The Jungle and the Sea (co-directed with S. Shakthidharan, winner of Best New Work and Best Production at the Sydney Theatre Awards), Angels in America, The Glass Menagerie, Into the Woods, Tommy Murphy’s Packer & Sons, Rita Kalnejais’s Babyteeth, Alana Valentine’s Wayside Bride (co-directed with Hannah Goodwin), Tom Wright’s adaptation of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, Eamon’s own adaptations of Hendrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov (Sydney Theatre Awards Best Production and Best Director), as well as The Rover, The Blind Giant is Dancing, As You Like It, and Beckett’s The End. His other directing credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Bob Presents/B Sharp) and Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui by Jason de Santis (Darwin Festival).

His writing and adaptation credits include: Associate Writer of S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking (winner of the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Victorian Literary Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Drama, Helpmann for Best New Work), co-writer with S. Shakthidharan of The Jungle and the Sea (Winner, Best New Work, Sydney Theatre Awards 2022); a stage adaptation of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children; Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Ivanov, Gorky’s Summerfolk, Sophocles’ Antigone and Ibsen’s Ghosts; co-adapter with Leah Purcell of Ruby Langford Ginibi’s memoir Don’t Take Your Love To Town; and co-deviser of Beautiful One Day with artists from ILBIJERRI, version 1.0, and the community of Palm Island.

For orchestral concert he has adapted and directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside Mendelssohn’s score for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Belvoir St Theatre conducted by Simone Young, and directed and co-created Beethoven and Bridgetower with Anna Goldsworthy, Rita Dove and Richard Tognetti for the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Simone Young

Australian-born Simone Young AM is internationally recognised as one of the leading conductors of her generation. Her appointment as Chief Conductor Designate with the Sydney Symphony was announced in 2020 and she will take up the post of the orchestra’s Chief Conductor in 2022. From 2005-2015 she was General Manager and Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera and Music Director of the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg, where she conducted repertoire ranging from Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Wagner and Strauss, to Hindemith, Britten and Henze. She is an acknowledged interpreter of the operas of Wagner and Strauss, having conducted several complete cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Vienna Staatsoper, the Staatsoper in Berlin and again, to great acclaim, in Hamburg as part of the ‘Wagner-Wahn’ Festival, during which she conducted the 10 major Wagner operas. Her Hamburg recordings include the Ring cycle, Mathis der Maler (Hindemith), and symphonies of Bruckner, Brahms and Mahler. Her 2012 tour to Brisbane with the Hamburg Opera and Ballet, (Das Rheingold in concert, and Mahler Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”), won her the 2013 Helpmann Award for the Best Individual Classical Music Performance.

Simone Young is regularly invited by the world’s great orchestras and has lead the New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Stockholm, New Japan, Helsinki, BBC and Dresden Philharmonic Orchestras; the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo; Orchestre de Paris; Staatskapelle Dresden; the Bruckner Orchestra Linz; the Barcelona, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Minnesota and BBC Symphony Orchestras; the Bavarian Radio Symphony; the Deutsches Sinfonie, Berlin; the Wiener Symphoniker; the Polish National Radio Symphony; the MDR Orchestra; the NHK Symphony, Tokyo; and the Orchestra Nacionale de Espana, Madrid. In Australia she has conducted the West Australian, Adelaide, Melbourne and Queensland Symphony Orchestras and the Australian World Orchestra..

Simone Young is also a favoured guest conductor at the world’s leading opera houses and in recent seasons has appeared at the Vienna State Opera: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten), Das verratene Meer (Henze), Lohengrin, The Gambler (Prokofiev), Faust, Parsifal and Salome; Bavarian State Opera, Munich: Jenufa, Tannhäuser, Aus einem toten Haus (Janacek), Tristan und Isolde, Fidelio, and Elektra; Berlin State Opera: Tosca, Fidelio, Chowantschina (Mussorgsky) Die Frau ohne Schatten, Tannhäuser; Zurich Opera: Elektra, Fidelio, Parsifal and Lohengrin; Teatro Real, Madrid: Lear (Reimann); Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm: Elektra. Upcoming engagements include returns to Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, The Metropolitan Opera New York and Opera Nationale de Paris.

Simone Young was Music Director of Opera Australia from 2001 to 2003, Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra from 1999 – 2002 and from 2007 – 2012 was Principal Guest Conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra, Lisbon. Since 2017 she has been the Principal Guest Conductor of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra.

Whilst Music Director of Opera Australia her development of musical standards in the company received praise from the profession and the public alike. During this time, productions she conducted included Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Otello, Eugene Onegin, Lulu, Lucia di Lammermoor, Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, Falstaff, Don Carlos, Andrea Chenier, La bohème, Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro (from the fortepiano), Katya Kabanova, Un Ballo in Maschera, Der Rosenkavalier and Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci.

Simone Young is the recipient of many awards and honours including the 2019 European Cultural Prize Vienna, the 2014 International Opera Awards for best anniversary production for the Verdi trilogy – La battaglia di Legnano, I due Foscari, I Lombardi with the Hamburg Staatsoper, the 2011 Sir Bernard Heinze Award, the 2005 prestigious Goethe Institute Medal, her appointment as a Member of the Order of Australia in 2004, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Western Australia, Griffith University, Monash University and the University of New South Wales.

She has also been elected to the Akademie der Kuenste in Hamburg, nominated as the Conductor of the Year by Opernwelt magazine and awarded a Professorship at the Musikhochschule in Hamburg. Other awards include Green Room Awards for her performances of Die Frau ohne Schatten (Melbourne Festival), Tristan und Isolde, and Lulu, Helpmann Awards for Best Classical Concert with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Best Musical Direction (Andrea Chenier), the Mo Award for “Classical Performer of the Year”, and a Grammy nomination for her recording of La Juive.

Hannah Goodwin

Hannah Goodwin (she/her) is a director who lives and works on Gadigal land. She is currently Resident Director at Belvoir Street Theatre. Her work includes Wayside Bride by Alana Valentine (Belvoir), Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill (Belvoir), The Sorry Mum Project by Pippa Ellams (National Theatre of Parramatta, Bondi Feast), A Girl in School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) by Lulu Raczka (Kings Cross Theatre), and The Carousel by Pippa Ellams (Shopfront Arts Co-op, Downstairs Belvoir, Merrigong X, Kings Cross Theatre). As assistant director: Black Brass by Mararo Wangai (Belvoir), Stop Girl by Sally Sara (Belvoir), My Brilliant Career by Kendall Feaver (Belvoir), Packer and Sons by Tommy Murphy (Belvoir), and Love by Patricia Cornelius (Darlinghurst Theatre Company).

Hannah was the 2020-2022 Andrew Cameron Fellow at Belvoir and the 2019 recipient of the ATYP Rose Byrne Leadership Scholarship.

Virginia Gay

 Virginia Gay graduated WAAPA, then spent four years pretending to be a nurse on All Saints, six months pretending to be Julia Gillard in the STC’s Wharf Revue, and then five years on Winners & Losers, where she pretended to know a lot about high finance. That last one, particularly, was a stretch. 

She won a Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actress for Calamity Jane, starred in the film Judy & Punch which premiered at Sundance, and wrote and directed her first short film Paper Cut, which made 2018 Tropfest finals. She’s also written a new adaptation of Cyrano for MTC. 

She’s been an apocalyptic squid in Eddie Perfect’s Vivid White, a prize bitch in The Beast, every stop on the bogan-to-hipster spectrum in On The Production Of Monsters, and a heart-broken everywoman Minnie and Liraz, all for the MTC. She played pacifist, suffragist, and feminist Vida Goldstein in The War That Changed Us (ABC), a fast-talking 1930s photographer in High Society, and an even faster talking woman-about-town, Mame in Mame (Hayes Theatre Company). She had a sold-out season at the Opera House of Cautionary Tales for Children (Arena Theatre Company) where she played a mildly-psychotic nanny, and was Bea Miles, iconic (and homeless) Sydney eccentric in the immersive-theatre experience Hidden Sydney. 

She has written two solo cabaret shows, Songs To Self-Destruct To and Dirty Pretty Songs, both of which sold out at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and which toured nationally and internationally, most notably headlining the Famous Spiegeltent at the Edinburgh Fringe. She also hosted La Clique in the Spiegeltent in Leicester Square Christmas 2019, when such things were possible. 

She makes regular appearances on Adam Liaw’s The Cook Up (SBS) The Book Club (ABC), Q + A (ABC), Adam Hills’ In Gordon Street Tonight (ABC), Good News Week (Channel 10), Studio at The Memo (Foxtel), The Unbelievable Truth (Channel 7), and was team captain on CRAM (Channel 10). 

Sarah Meacham

Sarah is a graduate of the University of Wollongong, Bachelor of Performance – Acting. Since graduating, her theatre credits include: The Cherry Orchard (Belvoir dir. Eamon Flack), First Love is the Revolution (Griffin Theatre Co.), Extinction of the Learned Response (Belvoir 25A, Glitterbomb dir. Carissa Licciardello), The Wolves (Belvoir and Redline Productions dir. Jessica Arthur) You Got Older (Mad March Hare Theatre Co. dir. Claudia Barrie), Dry Land (Mad March Hare Theatre Co. and Outhouse Theatre Co. dir. Claudia Barrie), All Good Things (ATYP dir. Iain Sinclair) and Phedre (touring the Asia-Pacific Bureau Directors’ Conference and Theatre Festival in Shanghai). In 2018, Sarah was awarded the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role for an Independent Production (for Dry Land which received a total of 5 Sydney Theatre Award Nominations). Screen credits include: Significant Others (ABC), Bump (Stan), Parisian Jam (dir. Rohan Bates), Doggy (dir. Troy Baird) and Amelia in Amelia (dir. Abhiram Joshi). Sarah has been a proud member of Actors Equity since 2013.

Rose Riley

Rose Riley is a graduate of Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). Her theatre credits include The Glass Menagerie for Belvoir (winner of the Green Room Award for Best Actress); Harp in the South and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Sydney Theatre Company; Richard 3 and Hamlet for Bell Shakespeare; Love for Darlinghurst Theatre Company; the touring production of 1984 for GWB Entertainment; Flood for Black Swan Theatre Co. Television credits include Mr Inbetween, Home and Away, Back to the Rafters, Stateless, Total Control, Diary of an Uber Driver, Mystery Road and The Secret City. Rose’s film credits include Book Week, The Death and Life of Otto Bloom and Truth.

Jack Scott

Jack Scott will next be seen in the highly anticipated Network Seven series RFDS.  He most recently appeared in the International Emmy Kids Award winning ABC series Hardball, ABC/HBO Max series Frayed and the feature film Hearts And Bones. 

Since graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2017, his other screen credits include the AFTRS Webseries Nanny Academy, ABC series Back In Very Small Business and Rosehaven, and Tonightly With Tom Ballard.  Jack has also starred on stage in The Cherry Orchard for Belvoir, We Are Gods for NIDA, Necrophillia for JackRabbit Theatre, Cool Pool Party and Hamlet for Ban Shakesepare.

Jack has a strong comedy background performing in numerous improv shows with Improv Theatre Sydney, including at the Sydney Comedy Festival, the Sydney Fringe Comedy Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.  While at WAAPA, he performed the roles of Mr Van Daan in The Diary Of Anne Frank and Tiger Brown in Threepenny Opera. He starred in the WA Screen Academy film Dark Horses, for which he won the Best Actor Award at the Next Gen Film Festival and the WA Unlocked Film Festival.

Tim Walter

Tim Walter is a graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and has performed with many major theatre companies in Australia. He has previously appeared with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Simone Young, in collaboration with John Bell and Bell Shakespeare, presenting Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet accompanied by excerpts from Shakespeare’s play. For Belvoir he has appeared in Hedda Gabler, As You Like It and Baghdad Wedding, as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream for B Sharp. Other theatre credits include As You Like It (Melbourne Theatre Company); A Flea in Her Ear, Perplex, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Sydney Theatre Company); Kryptonite (Sydney Theatre Company/State Theatre Company of South Australia); Things I Know To Be True (State Theatre Company of South Australia/Frantic Assembly); A Doll’s House, Casanova (Ensemble Theatre); Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Measure For Measure, Wars of the Roses, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Bell Shakespeare); Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome (Queensland Theatre Company/Bell Shakespeare); Ear to the Edge of Time, Rose Riot, Cyrano de Bergerac, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing (Sport For Jove); and Rainbow’s End (Riverside Theatre) On screen, Tim has appeared in the feature film Joe Cinque’s Consolation and on television in Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, Reef Break and Home and Away.

Brigid Zengeni

Brigid trained at Drama Centre London and has been a professional actor for 25 years. Her professional work spans television, theatre, radio and film. She has worked extensively in theatres such as The National and The RSC to The Lincoln Centre in New York.

Brigid was last seen in Blithe Spirit at Sydney Theatre Company. Her other selected theatre credits include Death Of A Salesman at STC, The Welkin at the National Theatre I’m Not Running directed by Neil Armfield, A Christmas Carol at RSC, Romeo & Juliet, Yerma, The Duchess Of Malfi, Volpone, Pandora, The Hyperchondriac, Dr Faustus, Three Sisters, Two Gentlemen Of Verona, Oliver Twist, and Twelfth Night.

In film, Brigid was most recently seen in The Good Liar, directed by Bill Condon. Other film credits include U Want Me 2 Kill Him?, The Hardest Part, and The Cry. Brigid’s selected television credits include Motherfatherson, with Richard Gere and Helen McCrory, Trying, Fortitude, House Of Anubis, Sherlock, and People Just Do Nothing.

George Zhao

George Zhao is an award-winning actor working across film, TV and theatre.

Since graduating with a Bachelor of Dramatic Art in 2013 he has performed in leading roles in Monkey Tales (Monkey Baa Theatre Company) and in the sold out season of The Screwtape Letters (Twisted Tree Theatre Company), which toured nationally in 2016 and 2017. In 2018 he performed in the award winning Sydney Theatre Company production Harp in the South – parts one and two.

His awards include ‘Best Guest Actor’ at the 2017 LA Web Film Festival for his role in the short film It Came from Outer Suburbia, and 2018 MEAA ‘Best Ensemble Cast’ for comedy for his role as Andrew Law in the hit SBS show The Family Law. George was also awarded the 2018 ‘Rising Star’ award by the Casting Guild of Australia.

Screen roles include SBS webseries Homecoming Queens, TV series Jack Irish, multiple seasonsof The Family Law, and a lead role of ‘Leo Gao’ in Runaway Millionaires.

George works extensively in Commedia dell’Arte, specialising in physical theatre, puppetry and mask work. He is based in Sydney.

Lisa Mimmocchi

Elle Evangelista

Elle Evangelista loves dancing. Her BELVOIR choreography credits include The Cherry Orchard, The Boomkak Panto, The Rep Season and A Midnight Summer’s Dream with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Her other theatre choreography credits include Twelfth Night (Bell Shakespeare), A Very Expensive Poison (NIDA) and How To Catch A Star (Australian Chamber Orchestra).

As a dancer she has worked for Force Majeure, KAGE Physical Theatre, Opera Australia and she has been awarded residencies to create new work by Ausdance NSW, DirtyFeet, Critical Path, March Dance, Brand X and Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance. From 2019 – 2021, Elle was an Artist Representative on the Board of Critical Path and in 2022 a Belvoir Artistic Associate.

Elle has a Bachelor of Arts in English from UWA and a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from WAAPA. She was raised on Boorloo/Perth by her Filipino and Burmese family and currently lives on Garigal Land in Sydney with her partner and their young son.

Samantha Clarke

Anna Dowsley

Cantillation