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 Rains Stopped Falling covers similar territory, and employs a comparably twisty approach to chronology. Song Of First Desire sees Bovell reteaming with director Neil Armfield, both having brought Things I Know to Be True to Belvoir’s stage in 2016.
Forgetting, then, becomes an active choice, a decision to let wounds fester rather than attend to them.
This production marks Song Of First Desire’s Australian debut, the work having first been seen by Spanish audiences in 2023, when Bovell collaborated with local theatre outfit Numero Uno Collective. Muriel, who translated the script, is a veteran of that production, as is the fourth member of the ensemble, Borja Maestre, whose two characters are both the catalyst for the story’s events and the key to understanding its subtext.
In the present day, Maestre plays Colombian migrant Alejandro, hired by Luis to both tend the garden of their decaying mansion and to care for Camelia, who is also in a state of what we might call fallen grandeur. (And if you want to draw comparisons with Belvoir’s recent production of August: Osage County, wherein another marginalised person is hired to care for a dotty matriarch and finds themselves bearing witness to a family’s tortured grappling with its past, we can’t stop you.)
Both Luis and Julia lust after Alejandro in their own way; the former is a self-flagellating gay man yearning for love, the latter a self-loathing and acid-tongued manipulator. For his part, Alejandro soothes the dementia-wracked Camelia, who finds some measure of solace in his presence.
In the 1968 timeline, Maestre portrays Margarita’s beloved son, Juan, a university student targeted by Carlos as a suspected anti-Franco activist. Having lost both her husband and Juan’s sister to Franco’s footsoldiers, Margarita is determined that Juan not suffer the same fate, despite what his ideals might drive him to do.
There are concrete narrative reasons as to why the cast are doubling up, but thematically, the choice reinforces the notion that the past will haunt us if not reckoned with. One of the key concepts Song Of First Desire examines is the Spanish policy Pacto del Olvido or “pact of forgetting”, which saw the country’s political organs agree to forego prosecuting crimes committed under the Fascist government following Franco’s death in 1975, a decision enshrined in the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law. But the scars remain – we’re told even the garden courtyard, depicted by set designer Mel Page as a barren space strewn with dead plants and leaves, bears bullet holes as evidence of Francoist firing squads. Forgetting, then, becomes an active choice, a decision to let wounds fester rather than attend to them.
It's heavy stuff, starkly lit by Morgan Moroney and underpinned by Clemence Williams’ somber, minimalist soundscape. We’re confronted with stark, troubling imagery from the Civil War and its aftermath as various characters recount their experiences; we watch acts of cruelty play out on the stage before us, and are asked to place them in the political and psychological context we’re presented with.
Only occasionally is the bleak mood leavened by humour, and it too is barbed and malicious, generally stemming from Luis and Julia’s vicious verbal sparring. But there’s a lot here to mull over, if you have the stomach for it.
Only a couple of flat notes stop Song Of First Desire from attaining top marks. One is that Fox’s Julia doesn’t speak with a Spanish accent; her lines ring out in a clear New Zealand voice that’s at odds with the rest of the cast, and the choice is jarringly at odds with the entire tone of the production. Fox’s performance is superb otherwise – the entire cast is nigh-flawless – but it definitely strikes the wrong note. The other is a late-in-the-game monologue that serves to reiterate the play’s themes, in case we were in any doubt. It’s a shaky denouement, largely superfluous, and it feels as though Bovell either doesn’t trust what has preceded it to speak clearly to his audience, or doesn’t trust that audience to pick up what he’s putting down. Coming at the end of an otherwise superlative play, it’s a discordant note to finish on.
Still, even with those caveats in mind, Song Of First Desire remains a powerful and insightful work – and given the current state of the world, a timely one.
Song Of First Desire is playing at Belvoir St Theatre, Surry Hills, until March 23, 2025. Tickets range from $41-$97 and you can find them over here.
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