A Room with a View
Adaptation: Grace Chapple
Director: Hannah Goodwin
Belvoir Upstairs Theatre, Surry Hills
3 October – 1 November 2026
Belvoir’s production of Grace Chapple’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View is an entertaining exploration of the tension between rigid social conventions and a younger generation’s impulse towards individual freedom.
Forster’s comedy of manners (published in 1908) sends its female characters to Florence on a version of the tried-and-true Grand Tour. On arriving at their pensione, Lucy Honeychurch (Nathalie Morris) and her older cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett (Hayley McElhinney), are peevishly dismayed to discover they have been allocated a room without a view of the river. Hearing their complaints, fellow guests the Emersons, a free-spirited father and son, generously offer to swap rooms. Affronted by an offer from people she considers beneath them, Charlotte haughtily refuses, but is persuaded to accept by another guest, Mr Beebe (Tom Conroy), an Anglican minister.
As they tour the city, Lucy and George (Luke Wiltshire) share various encounters and are drawn to each other, raising the question: will they defy convention? Lucy’s feelings are further confused by the arrival from London of the aesthete Cecil Vyse (Charles Wu), who courts and proposes to her. Bewildered, she refuses, leaving the romantic dilemma unresolved. Back in England, however, and influenced by her mother (Kate Atkinson), she bows to convention and accepts Cecil. It is the clear-sighted Mr Emerson (Patrick Williams) who takes her aside, points out how unsuited she and Cecil are, and paves the way for a reunion with George.
With such a diverse set of characters, director Hannah Goodwin keeps the narrative light, humorous and pacy. The tourists indulge in typical holiday activities, and a tennis match adds a touch of latent feminism: in a doubles game against the three men, Lucy leaves them gaping at her skill. Another charmingly modern moment, perhaps with a gay undertone, occurs when the men, wandering through a local forest, find a swimming pond. In short order Lucy’s brother Freddy (Tomáš Kantor), George and even the Reverend Beebe strip naked and jump in. It is a delightfully funny scene of three young men enjoying the simple freedom of splashing about in an otherwise constrained era. The sound effects in both the tennis and swimming scenes are impressively spot-on, sometimes achieved with just a single piano note (Grace Ferguson and Madeleine Picard).
The costumes, especially the women’s, are beautiful and true to the period. The set, by contrast, is a minimalist space, with a screen providing a secondary area that serves as several locations, including a field of violets, a swimming pond and an Italian chapel, through small shifts in light and sound (Amelia Lever-Davidson and Madeleine Picard).
The cast performs as an excellent ensemble, and Belvoir is to be congratulated on a stellar production, one of the year’s best.
