SONG OF FIRST DESIRE

By Diana Simmonds

February 21 2025

SONG OF FIRST DESIRE, Upstairs Belvoir, Belvoir St Theatre, 13 February-23 March 2025. Photography by Brett Boardman

Andrew Bovell’s new play continues his recent penchant for long, poetic titles (Things I Know To Be True, When The Rain Stops Falling), although, Song of First Desire is the title of a 1920s poem by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Early on, it’s quietly recited by Sarah Peirse (Camelia/Margarita), establishing a sense of fragmented yearning, for the past, for happiness:

In the green morning / I wanted to be a heart. / A heart.
And in the ripe evening / I wanted to be a nightingale / A nightingale.
(Soul, / turn orange-coloured. turn the colour of love.)
In the vivid morning / I wanted to be myself. / A heart.
And at the evening's end / I wanted to be my voice. / A nightingale.
Soul, / turn orange-coloured. turn the colour of love.

In his program notes director Neil Armfield observes,                                                                   “Writing a play from Australia about the inheritance of fascism in Spain might seem to be a massive reach…” Well, yes. He continues: “…but Andrew’s fractal poetics come from a place with its own history of forgetting, of silence, of lies erasing a shameful past.” It’s a false equivalence, however, as Spain’s forgetting and silence is about 40-odd years of an authoritarian regime and civil war – rather than two centuries of colonialism and attempted genocide.

Meanwhile, unless your knowledge of 20th-century Spanish history is better than the norm, and you also have a good ear for deciphering heavily accented English, chances are you’ll be lost for much of the show’s 110 minutes.

A primer: it’s set in the present – “NOW” projected on a wall – and in 1968 – “THEN” projected on another wall. Pay attention to these clues as the costumes aren’t much use as signifiers. Although at least a few women in the audience (in an alarmingly half-empty second night) wondered about the humiliatingly ugly underwear Pierse wears to indicate Camelia is an old woman who’s losing it.

Her adult twins Julia (Kerry Fox) and Carlos (Jorge Muriel) bring a Colombian migrant in to care for their mother. Alejandro (Borja Maestre) is as kind and caring as the siblings are not. He and Camelia tend her garden where the vegetation carries no memories of the house’s wicked past. (Mel Page’s set design is a simple space of deep, dark earth whose edges are planted with living green. Enhancing it, Morgan Moroney’s lighting is a chiaroscuro mix of dreamlike and nightmare states.)

The tightly interlaced patterns of family life are what Bovell is so good at – think Lantana, and especially When The Rain Stops Falling. In the latter “his intricate weaving of apparently disparate characters and events that all meet in the end after complex, subtle plotting that weaves loves, losses, mysteries, crimes and misunderstandings into a narrative of lasting fascination” (Stagenoise, May 2009).1`

Lasting fascination is not there this time, however. The secrets and lies are either obvious or obscured by tonnes of topsoil. Nevertheless, playing eight characters and three generations between them, the four actors are mesmerising in their different ways. Kerry Fox is all edges and spikes and malevolent observer; Borja Maestre is tenderness personified when not being the spunk-rat twin Juan. And Jorge Muriel makes his creepy, closet gay a figure of sadness when not chilling as Carlos, a minor Francophile functionary and husband of Carmen.

As is so often the case, however, it’s Sarah Peirse who commands attention, whatever she’s doing – or not doing. At the moment (21 February) she’s limping and strapped on an opening night injury to her left knee, but it’s of little consequence in the full scheme of Pierse.

Madrid company Octubre Productions commissioned the play after the successful staging of two Bovell plays. It was translated into Spanish by Muriel who also appeared in 2023. Spain in the past century is fascinating: Catholicism, fascism and Communism all collided into military dictator Franco, whose brutal regime repressed the country, and made it a social pariah for decades – and also restored the monarchy! You couldn’t make it up.

Yet little of this unlikely and rich tapestry is to be found in Song of First Desire – even though Lorca was famously one of its victims and its faint echoes are everywhere. Instead, it’s more family-social saga with a drizzle of politics that might be dubbed universal, which is fine if it were not burdened by overblown portents. That it might be thought profound might have more to do with the names Armfield, Bovell, Pierse and Fox. Or it could be a case of King Carlos’s new clothes.