Set in Spain, this new play tells us a lot about the ‘two Australias’

On a rumpled couch between rehearsals at Belvoir St Theatre, actor Kerry Fox recalls her first encounter with Song of First Desire, a new play by writer and producer Andrew Bovell.

“He sent an email asking me to do it, but I purposefully didn’t retain which character he wanted me to play,” she says. “Then, when I read the play, I got really attracted to one character in particular. I sank into it immediately.”

Director Neil Armfield with actor Kerry Fox and Armfield’s constant companion, Lock.Credit: Janie Barrett

Such was her passion that she delayed finding out until the next day.

“But, it was her,” she says. “Julia. “Funny, bitter, and extremely manipulative. And lost. So lost.”

The character, one of eight in a play that Bovell originally created with Madrid theatre company Numero Uno Collective, kicks off Belvoir’s 2025 season.

Directed by Neil Armfield and also featuring Sarah Peirse, Jorge Muriel and Borja Maestre, the play, named after a poem by Frederico García Lorca, is set in 1968 and present-day Spain.

Telling the story of a family whose lives were fractured during the Franco dictatorship in Spain, Song of First Desire, or Canción del Primer Deseo, begins with Colombian immigrant and caregiver, Alejandro, arriving at the neglected house of Julia, her brother, Luis, and their mother, Camelia.

Woven in between is the storyline of four people living five decades before. All are connected by long-buried secrets.

Bovell, known for Lantana, The Secret River, and Things I Know To Be True (in development for a screen adaption with Nicole Kidman), already had a close working relationship with Numero Uno.

“They had staged two of my plays, and we decided to make a new work,” he says. “It was to be about Spain.”

He asked them a question he begins every new collaboration with – what is the thing you’re most afraid to talk about?

“And, for them, the answer was the civil war,” he says.

Company members spoke about their country’s past, telling stories of their grandparents who had lived through the Spanish Civil War.

Bovell, who began studying Spanish, learnt about the “White Terror”, the period during and after the civil war when nationalist troops arrested, tortured and assassinated between 160,000 and 400,000 people in Spain.

He learnt further about the “Pact of Forgetting”, an informal agreement negotiated between the political sides after Franco’s death in 1975.

To move on, it was decided the past should be forgotten. Accountability for years of violence and death was all but extinguished.

Creating the work was challenging. Company members’ ancestors had fought on opposing sides. Animosities from the past came into the present.

‘The two Spains’

At Song of First Desire’s premiere season in Madrid in 2023, performed in Spanish with Muriel and Maestre in the cast, audiences were passionate in different ways.

“There’s a saying in Spain which is las dos Españas, or ‘the two Spains’,” Bovell says. “It’s not unlike here. We have two Australias: there’s an Australia that wants to recognise what happened in the past in terms of First Nations people and there’s an Australia that says we need to move on.”

Franco’s bitter legacy continues to echo through modern Spain. In 2018, a protester holds a banner showing the late dictator with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.Credit: AP

This tension prompted Bovell to suggest the play to Belvoir’s artistic director, Eamon Flack.

“We have our own silence,” Bovell says. “It wasn’t a formal agreement, but we had our own way of avoiding talking about the past.”

Armfield, who took on directing Song of First Desire from Flack, agrees.

“We have a history in this country of terra nullius,” he says. “There’s two centuries of lies that have been told and that have suppressed the truth.

“The way that the Voice was silenced in 2023 means there are also the forces in Australia who are finding it better to push the past away.”

Song of First Desire marks another collaboration for Armfield and Bovell.

‘Here’s a story about the historical legacy of fascism and it’s reminding us of its rise in Europe again’

Andrew Bovell

Bovell’s play Things I Know to Be True was Armfield’s last production at Belvoir in 2019, and 13 years ago, the pair began work on the acclaimed stage adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.

“Andrew is extremely spare in what he writes, but everything is meaningful,” Armfield says. “In this play, and in his other works, there’s a central germ of an idea that opens up and flowers in a number of directions, like a crystal opening up under a microscope.”

For Bovell, the play spans a complex and damaged family, ideas around belonging and identity, and Australia’s place in the world.

“We’re a long, long way from what’s going on in the rest of the world and I think we can start to get inward-looking,” he says.

“Here’s a story about the historical legacy of fascism, and it’s reminding us of its rise in Europe again. I’m hoping it’s an invitation for Australian audiences to consider the implications of that.”

Song of First Desire is at Belvoir St Theatre until March 23.