An appetite for local experiences is driving Belvoir's programming, writes Elissa Blake.
Belvoir's artistic director Eamon Flack believes there is a new hunger for Australian stories in the community.
From the company's bottom line perspective, there had better be, given Flack has programmed eight new Australian works (including comedian Hannah Gadsby's stand-up show Dogmatic), a revival of a modern Australian classic (The Blind Giant is Dancing), interspersed with just three overseas works and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
"I really do believe we're seeing a return of interest in our own history," Flack says as he prepares to launch the company's latest new Australian play, Kit Brookman's The Great Fire. 
"People are taking time to reflect on our past and imagine the future and for us it's an opportunity to look at what a so-called Great Australian Story is and what kind of stories there might be in the future."
Flack's focus on new Australian writing comes as no surprise to those who have observed his work - including as a former literary manager - but it marks a strong swing away from Belvoir's recent trajectory, in which the company developed a reputation as a director's theatre, home to Adena Jacobs, Anne-Louise Sarks and Simon Stone.
"I see this year as a statement of intent," says Flack. "It's not a deliberate swing away from classics and adaptations of classics. It's a temperamental change and an acknowledgement that we've built a really good new writing team over the years."
Flack's new appointments to Belvoir's creative team bolster the company's new writing commitment. Tom Wright is a writer whose previous credits include Black Diggers and a recent adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock for Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre. Nell Ranney is a producer and director who, among other things, was instrumental in getting a season of Sydney writer Mathew Whittet's play Silver into Belvoir's Downstairs Theatre in 2009.
Any company can say they are committed to new Australian work, says Kit Brookman. The proof is getting the show on.
"Other companies commission a vast amount but it never gets to the stage. Here you have a pathway, which is a very important way of thinking about new writing. A more scattergun situation is the norm and the follow through often isn't there. Plays into which a lot of effort and resources have been put, fall through the cracks because there is a lack of rigour in the commissioning company."
Belvoir has to follow through because it doesn't have time and money to burn on projects that don't see the light of day, says Flack.
"We're something like the third or fourth biggest company in the country but we're still scratching around in the dirt, ultimately," he says. "We don't have the shine of some of our peers. We have to look to touch a nerve rather than present a spectacle. The storytellers are all we've got."
But new work is the most risky to make and cuts to Australia Council budgets have an outsized impact on Australian writing, Flack warns.
"Where the really vital work needs to be done is exactly where the cuts hit hardest, the small and medium sector. But it doesn't mean for a second that we should take refuge in known work. We have to continue that quest for new voices, and voices of a diverse background.
"I would love to think the arts have a serious contribution to make in this country," says Flack. "I don't even know if anyone in power bothers to look to the arts to forge social change, but it seems to me that the question of what our future holds is an essential question that politics has failed dismally to address. That is such fertile ground for great storytelling and at Belvoir, we want to help set the agenda."
The Great Fire opens at Belvoir St Theatre on   April 6