Song Of First Desire
Set in Madrid, the narrative action of Song Of First Desire occupies two distinct time frames. In the present day, acerbic twins Luis (Jorge Muriel) and Julia (Kerry Fox) are dealing with the mental decline of their ageing mother, Camelia (Sarah Peirse). Meanwhile, in 1968, where Spain is under the fascist Franco regime, police commander Carlos (Muriel again) and his wife Carmen (Fox again) find their preparations for their daughter’s wedding disrupted when the latter encounters Margarita (Peirse, and you can see the pattern by now, surely), a woman who seems to know them from the past.
“The past” in this case is the play’s third temporal setting: the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and the White Terror that followed, in which Franco’s Nationalists enacted bloody purges and reprisals on the Spanish people, replete with mass extrajudicial executions and the torture of suspected dissidents. None of the on-stage action takes place in that period, but everything we see is rooted there – the sins of the past cast a heavy pall over the characters and the substance of the play itself, which deals with generational trauma, family secrets, incest, perversity, colonialism, and the rhyming nature of history, both personal and political.
These are familiar themes for acclaimed Australian playwright Andrew Bovell. His 2008 play When the Rain Stopped Falling covers similar territory, and employs a comparably twisty approach to chronology. Song Of First Desire sees Bovell reteaming with...