To let you in on a secret, last month we were planning to re-open this week. Could you imagine? But Covid is still Covid, and its nature is to catch us all off guard. So we are not re-opening this week. But we have just completed rehearsals of a show (!) and last Friday afternoon all the staff of Belvoir gathered (at 1.5 metres) in our rehearsal room to watch the company run of A Room of One’s Own.

A company run is a rehearsal room performance of the show before it moves up to the theatre, and the first time the show meets an audience in the form of Belvoir’s staff. In normal times company runs are part of the rhythm of life at Belvoir, coming around every five or six weeks like a special kind of clock. But this was our first company run in 25 weeks. And it was glorious. Anita Hegh was glorious. Woolf’s text was glorious. We wish you could all have seen it. Soon, fingers crossed.

Hoping and readying to re-open is not all we have been doing. Three months ago we launched Artists at Work and since then we been able to offer 151 gigs to artists, from half-day playreadings to 3-month part-time contracts, to work on over 20 different plays, most of them new Australian works. This is a massive amount of creative development work, and there is more to come. The best thing about all this work is that most of it isn’t normally possible. We only found the time to do it because Covid shut our theatre, and we have only had the resources to do it because of the record-smashing 1,546 people who donated to Belvoir in the last two months of the financial year. Thank you all. We’ll have more to tell you about Artists at Work in the coming weeks.

One last piece of news. Next week we will start rehearsals for My Brilliant Career. The show will rehearse for four weeks, and then the work will pause until we can put it in front of an audience later in the year. This is not how we normally work, separating rehearsals and performances. It will be odd for the artists, and odd for the company. But we have to do what we can when we can. In this, life at Belvoir is the same as it is for everyone now. Taking our best chances as they come, watching and waiting to see how things play out, doing our best to stick together.

Thank you for sticking with us. We hope to see you soon.

Eamon Flack and Sue Donnelly
Artistic Director and Executive Director