I'm writing this on my holiday, from a small town on a hill in central Tuscany. Last night there was a dinner in the main street - 200 or so people of all ages sat at long tables and laughed and shouted and talked and ate the food they had grown and cooked and drank the wine they'd made. I asked my neighbour at the table how often this kind of event takes place - "Oh, about ten times a year," he said. Amazing, I thought. This community gathers every six weeks or so, for pleasure shared, stories exchanged, children watching their parents, grandparents watching their children.

Walking home later I thought that's what a theatre can be. A place where every six weeks or so a group of 300 or so people come together to share in the pleasure of witnessing story.

For 20 odd years Company B at Belvoir St has been building its traditions, putting down layers of story. My hope is that it remains a reliable and developing place of surprise, witness and joy. I hope that our community has gathered and found pleasure, and that each subsequent visit is enriched by the memory of earlier visits, that the success of each production is measured by how vividly it stays alive in the mind. I hope for the theatre to be like a fabulous favourite restaurant that keeps adding to its menu, changing, but where the taste, the style, the quality, the idea behind it remain recognisable, unique and inimitable.

Our Season for 2008 is defined by its powerful sense of fable, of large cultural ideas finding definition in the emblematic patterns of relationship and behaviour. And somewhere near the heart of each show lies the question, 'How is art created out of loss, contradiction and social trauma?' How does the enactment of fable alter the story by telling it? How is it that despair is somehow redeemed by laughter?

Things grow.

Particularly exciting in 2008 is that three of the shows introduce directors to the Upstairs Theatre who have come to Belvoir St through startling work in the independent theatre scene and for B Sharp in the Downstairs Theatre. It's a particular testament to Lyn Wallis, who left Company B after 10 years' glorious service only weeks ago, that her vision in creating B Sharp is bearing such spectacular fruit.

Over the past couple of years there has been show after show where people queued at the Belvoir St box office, unable to get a ticket - Gulpilil, Page 8, The Sapphires, Stuff Happens, Keating!, Parramatta Girls, Exit the King, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?... They stood there cursing the fact that they had neglected to buy a Season Ticket. Don't let that be you in 2008!

Love,

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