Sad News For Sydney - Neil Armfield to leave Company B

Neil Armfield to leave Company B

The gist is that 2010 will be Neil Armfield’s last season as artistic director of Belvoir St Theatre. This is sad news to me. Since coming to University and exploring the theatre landscape of Sydney, Belvoir has been a source of some amazing experiences. The first show I saw there, Benedict Andrews' "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?", remains to this day my favourite theatrical production. However, Armfield’s own “Scorched” would be a close contender, and many other Belvoir shows would not be far behind. One of my lecturers once described Belvoir plays under Armfield’s direction as “absolutely reeking of humanity”, and this is why I think they have been so successful.

The new artistic director is not expected to be announced for another six months or so, and it will be exciting to see the direction the company now takes, but after 15 years, it’s going to be quite an adjustment.

- Simon

A Short Welcome

Well... Relatively short anyway.

This blog was conceived in a car. Simon (my co-blogger) and I were travelling to Sydney to see STC’s rather excellent War of the Roses and, in what slowly stopped being a joke about getting to meet Allison Croggan, we hit upon the need in the online arts blogging community for a student voice. A voice focused on how seeing independent and professional theatre can shape and influence a young emerging artist. We thought back to our favourite shows over the past years and how the sessions in which we saw them at Uni were changed and effected by these experiences, what we learnt from them. We remembered how shows like Martin Del Amo’s Never Been This Far Away From Home Before opened our eyes to stillness and storytelling, how UOW’s Oedipus Wrecks showed us excess and the magic of an unexpected dance number and how Company B’s Who’s Afraid... blew our heads off completely and made us point back to the theatre on our way out and say: “I want to be able to do that.”

So in memory of these and many other shows, we decided it was time to share our impressions of the theatre we see and the impression that they make on us as we finish up our final years of study.

Wish us luck.
Mark