Theatre audiences are taking their seats again following the long, uncertain coronavirus-enforced shutdown – but you may be surprised by the content they’re hungry for. As Belvoir theatre’s artistic director Eamon Flack launches part one of the theatre company’s 2021 season, he says he’s gratified by the feedback he’s hearing.

“We thought for a while there would be a great hunger for comedy – and there always is – but people want to grapple with seriousness at the moment,” he tells Broadsheet. “There’s a strong sense people want to see work that is answering back to the world right now, of respecting the weird times we’re in and not just giggle away with them.”

The 2021 season was almost confirmed before the global pandemic forced the temporary shutdown of the arts industry. Since then Flack has juggled various alternatives to put into action, depending on how things played out.

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“It’s pretty different, but not as different as it might have been for a while there, when we thought we’d have to reinvent the whole idea of what a theatre company is,” he says. Flack was determined to salvage and support new Australian works, while staging shows that provided as many opportunities for artists as possible.

Next year’s opening work does just that, with the return of one of the theatre’s best-loved shows, young Australian writer-actor Yve Blake’s Fangirls. A celebratory, hilarious and touching musical, Fangirls explores and acknowledges “the frenzy of the digital spaces young fangirls inhabit”. Blake will no longer play the lead role – she is working on a screen adaptation of the musical – and an expanded cast will perform the work in the larger Seymour Centre.

“It’s about the joy of the pop concert; audiences were hysterical with joy, it felt so fresh and that’s exciting,” says Flack.

ABC journalist and presenter Sally Sara makes her theatrical debut with the semi-autobiographical play Stop Girl. The host of The World Today on ABC Radio, Sara is an award-winning journalist and former foreign correspondent who reported from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. Stop Girl stars Sheridan Harbridge as a former foreign correspondent who returns to Australia to find a very different country to the one she left. Flack describes it as “a rat-baggy, wise play by a writer who’s seen it all first hand, and has learnt how to ask the pointed questions”. Anne-Louise Sarks directs.

The sold-out play that was Belvoir’s first performance post-Covid, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, returns in 2021. Adapted for the stage by Carissa Licciardello and Tom Wright from two of Woolf’s 1928 essays, it’s a searing critique of the patriarchy that could have been written today, delivered in a tour-de-force performance by Anita Hegh.

From May, Flack will direct Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, a play he’s long sought to steer. So why now? “We need to talk about change. Everybody,” Flack answers firmly. The Russian playwright’s great, last play centres on uncertainty and impending change in a poignant and at times comic masterpiece performed by a large, talented cast that includes Pamela Rabe.

“At the moment people are craving a reflection on the experience of what we’re living through without having to constantly tweet about it. This is a step back, because it’s a play in Russia 100 years ago it’s going to allow us to breathe and reflect on this experience of change without having to argue about it or have a position on it,” Flack says. “Not everything should be about us right now.”

In a complete change of pace, writer-actor Michelle Law’s Miss Peony offers “a glitzy, glamorous and slightly unhinged comedy about being caught between two generations and two cultures”. The work was originally slated to show this year and stars Law and Mabel Li.

Rounding off part one of Belvoir’s 2021 season is At What Cost? a new work by the 2019 Balnaves Fellow Nathan Maynard about Palawa man Dan, who is juggling a young family with his responsibilities to land and people when a host of newbies arrive in his native Tasmania claiming to be Palawa, too.

“Nathan is a great comic writer but inside the comedy is one of the sharpest tragedies I’ve seen from an Australian writer in a very long time,” Flack says.

While it’s exciting to be talking about season 2021 there’s no denying the arts industry has been crippled by both Covid-19 and the inadequate response from the federal and state governments.

“Covid was a real shock for many, many artists, to see how starkly they’re not built into the infrastructure of the arts in Australia,” says Flack, pointing out many people are reluctantly leaving the industry.

“Jobkeeper saved us, as did the generosity of our audiences and donors. We made difficult choices early and at the moment we’re fine, but we’ve had no additional government support, we hope we will in the new year because the money will not last.”

Tickets are on sale for part one of Belvoir’s 2021 season here. Part two will be launched by the end of April.