Song of First Desire (Belvoir) ★★★½

Written by Andrew Bovell. Belvoir. 13 Feb – 23 Mar, 2025.

There’s a ghost haunting Song of First Desire. Well, two, actually: the Ghost of Stories Past and the Ghost of Stories Future. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a few paragraphs. All you need to know right now is that four utterly compelling performances are happening on stage at Belvoir, with Sarah Peirse shining like a star.

The dual narrative of the play begins in present-day Madrid, where Carmelia (Peirse), an elderly mother, lives with her bitter adult twin children, Julia (Kerry Fox) and Luis (Jorge Muriel). Carlos has offered room and board to a Colombian man he met at the doctor’s office, Alejandro (Borja Maestre), who can help care for Carmelia. It doesn’t escape Julia’s notice that Carlos is infatuated with Alejandro, and she takes pleasure in manipulating her brother’s affections.

In flashbacks, we see events in 1968, where a mother, Margarita (Peirse again), confronts a wealthy couple about the events of the Civil War, in which she lost both a husband and a child. The scars of this conflict will be felt for generations to come.

If the rough outline of the play sounds familiar, it might be because it bears a striking, albeit coincidental, resemblance to the plot of Counting & Cracking (the Ghost of Stories Past I mentioned earlier). A present day mother reflecting on the events of her youth in a country torn-apart by civil war. The resemblance is purely superficial, but once the thought crossed my mind, I couldn’t shake it. It was then that the universality of the story really hit home for me. It doesn’t take much for people to turn on one another—man’s inhumanity to man, and so on.

In the show’s programme, writer Andrew Bovell talks about the resonance of Spain’s unspoken trauma and the concept of Dos Españas or the “Two Spains”—in which two conflicting ideas of Spain exist side-by-side—and its parallels to Australia’s unresolved national colonial sins. But my thoughts were firmly rooted in the future, reflecting on what it takes for a civilisation to go from prosperity to mass murder.

The events of the Spanish Civil War and the authoritarianism of Franco’s regime are still recent history, and I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread when thinking about current politics and where the rise of fascism in 2025 might be leading us (the Ghost of Stories Future I mentioned). What would it take for Australia to descend into those depths? Will it be long before America falls over the edge? Was I just blindly fortunate enough to live in a relatively peaceful time in our history?

It’s a lot to process while watching a play.

I could have easily gotten lost in these thoughts if not for the riveting performances on stage. Sarah Peirse is mesmerising in her dual roles, effectively communicating the shifting time periods. Borja Maestre’s authenticity and conviction radiate anguish. Kerry Fox and Jorge Muriel deliver a toxic, codependent dynamic that is as funny as it is unsettling.

The dual, dovetailing narratives present an odd mixture. The 1968 storyline is a gripping, gut-wrenching tale filled with rage and politics, while the modern-day narrative edges toward a bitter familial comedy (reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or August: Osage County). At times, I struggled to find a tonal connection between the two. However, when the layers of exposition reveal the links, it is disturbing and disorienting to reframe much of what you’ve already seen.

It was in the closing moments that the play started to lose me, as the events threatened to veer into melodrama, almost hitting misery porn levels. This last-minute piling on felt out of step with the rest of the play, which had carefully parcelled out its information slowly and deliberately.

As a cautionary tale of the depths to which humanity can sink, Song of First Desire is frightening. As an exploration of the personal impacts of historical events, it is both beautiful and upsetting. There is no denying how exceptional these four performers are, which makes this a rich and rewarding piece of theatre.