Adelaide Festival leans into its reputation as a truly international arts festival in 2025, with a program featuring leading Irish actor Stephen Rea performing Beckett, a contemporary Finnish opera about the aftermath of a school shooting, a music-meets-memoir tribute to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and a streamlined celebration of the complete works of Shakespeare – performed by salt shakers, tomato sauce bottles and other mundane objects.
Artistic Director Brett Sheehy AO, who previously programmed Adelaide Festival from 2005 to 2008 (and who stepped into his current role just months ago, following the unexpected departure of Ruth Mackenzie CBE in August) says he is “thrilled to be back at the helm of our nation’s major cultural drawcard for the past 65 years, rightly deserving its moniker of ‘Australia’s International Festival’”.
Thanking his predecessors, Mackenzie, Neil Armfield AO and Rachel Healy, for setting the groundwork with their prior commitments to several productions, Sheehy continued: “I’ve relished the opportunity to complete the program of extraordinary opera, dance, theatre and music works you won’t experience anywhere else in the country.
“Since my first Adelaide Festival in 2006, I’ve had the privilege of continuing to present live performances and to analyse exactly why the art forms of theatre, music, dance and opera continue to thrive. The explosion in recent research into what makes us happy has landed on a not surprising though now scientifically validated conclusion – humans are made happy by the experiential over the material. Simply put, we reach our greatest enjoyment and satisfaction through experiences over things. And Adelaide Festival is a living embodiment of this,” he says.
The 2025 Adelaide Festival’s opening weekend includes an international blockbuster directed by Australian expat Simon Stone: Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and Finnish novelist-turned-librettist Sofi Oksanen’s contemporary opera, Innocence.
“I have always been a champion of 21st century opera, works that directly address themes of our time and place, and speak directly to us through perhaps the most elevating of art forms. Innocence is orchestrally lush, is deeply moving and extraordinarily staged. This is unquestionably Australia’s opera event of the year. No epic, contemporary, international opera has been brought to Australia in years, and as the international media and audiences have called it, Innocence is a masterpiece and a triumph, and it’s already being hailed as the greatest opera of the 21st century,” Sheehy says.
Having long been a devotee of the Nobel Prize-winning Irish dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett, Sheehy is also excited to present “what may well be the definitive version of Krapp’s Last Tape,” which Beckett wrote in 1958 and which stars “the current master of Irish stage and screen, Stephen Rea, perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated role in The Crying Game”.
Sheehy continues: “In the play we meet Krapp, a man in his late 60s who every year, on his birthday, records a new tape, a review of the year just gone. But for this birthday, his 69th, he listens back to a tape he recorded three decades before – and exactly mirroring Beckett’s conceit, in the hope of one day playing the role of Krapp, Stephen Rea himself recorded the script of the play when he was a young man. Now that day has come: a great Irish actor performing one of history’s greatest Irish roles, exactly as it was meant to be.”
Other international works in the program include Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the Absent by author and actor Dorcy Rugamba, a love letter to members of Rugamba’s family murdered in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, which he performs with Senegalese multi-instrumentalist and singer Majnun; the previously announced Club Amour, a triple bill exploring love and desire from Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal; and UK company Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, in which all 36 of Shakespeare’s plays are performed over eight days.
Describing the production as ideal for anyone who’s ever found Shakespeare “a little too difficult or unclear or inaccessible or alienating,” Sheehy adds: “As the actors narrate the stories, they manipulate household ingredients to represent each character of the play. Lady Macbeth may be a tomato sauce bottle. Richard the Third could be a salt shaker. And Hamlet is, in fact, a container of flea powder.
“With refreshing and eye-opening clarity, and with each performance just 45 to 60 minutes long, this is Shakespeare as you’ve never imagined, but maybe always hoped for. Each play is distilled to its core, its narrative essence, and clear as a bell,” he explains.
Celebrating First Peoples and local talents
The 2025 Festival is also noteworthy for a number of works by First Nations artists, including ILBIJERRI Theatre’s acclaimed Big Name, No Blankets, a celebration of the lives and music of Warumpi Band; Karul Projects’ The Walking Track, six short site-specific dance works presented by Vitalstatistix in and around the company’s home, the Waterside Workers Hall in Yartapuulti/Port Adelaide; the Australian premiere of nyilamum – song cycles by Dr Lou Bennett AM and the Australian String Quartet; and the NORPA production My Cousin Frank, written and performed by Rhoda Roberts AO.
“I’ve been lucky to know the legendary Rhoda Roberts for many years. When Rhoda was at Garma Festival this year, she spoke on the ABC about a work she was developing for the stage about her cousin, Frank Roberts. I got in touch with Rhoda immediately. Why? Because Frank Roberts was Australia’s first ever Indigenous Olympian, representing this nation in boxing at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. And here was a story – a man – I’d never heard of,” Sheehy enthuses.
“The idea of Rhoda herself on stage telling Frank’s story was irresistible. This was a man who was representing his country at the Olympic Games, a man who was invited to dine with Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, yet he was a man who could not go there on an Australian passport. Why? Because at the time, in my own lifetime, this nation had decided that an Indigenous Australian was not an Australian citizen. Here’s a story of a conquest of injustice, a triumph of obstacles, of family, love and commitment, of immense talent and determination, [of] changing history.”
Read: From true crime to post-colonialism: Sydney Festival launches its 2025 season
One of the joys of any major arts festival is seeing Australian artists celebrated alongside international talents. For the 2025 Adelaide Festival, Adelaide powerhouse Slingsby, which recently announced it would be winding up operations in 2026, offers up a sneak peak of its upcoming production The Giant’s Garden, a work-in-progress adaptation of Oscar Wilde‘s The Selfish Giant, while South Australian playwright Fleur Kilpatrick will see her latest work, War of the Worlds (based on the science fiction classic by H G Wells) performed not once, but three times simultaneously by youth theatre companies in the South Australian towns of Whyalla and Barmera, as well as Bendigo in regional Victoria.
“Never before have three different theatre companies in three different venues all worked together to present the one show in real time. Youth theatre companies in Whyalla, Barmera and Bendigo stage Fleur Kilpatrick’s wonderful adaptation of H G Wells’ classic War of the Worlds, told through the eyes of a 2025 teenage cast,” Sheehy says of the production.
Other program highlights include an Adelaide season of Trent Dalton’s Love Stories, a Queensland Theatre production; new dance works by Melbourne choreographers Stephanie Lake and Lucy Guerin; a musical love letter by Irish vocalist Camille O’Sullivan dedicated to her late friends, Shane MacGowan of The Pogues and Sinéad O’Connor; the return of Adelaide Writers’ Week from 1-6 March, once more helmed by Director Louise Adler AM; and a strong visual art program, including the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Radical Textiles, featuring a selection of tapestry, embroidery, quilting and tailoring from over 100 artists, designers and activists.
At ACE Gallery, Shared Skin delves into the evolving definitions of relationships and families through new commissions and existing works by First Nations and culturally diverse contemporary artists, while at Carrick Hill, artists Catherine Truman and Ian Gibbins present The Taken Path, a year-long documentary exploring the profound effects of climate change and human industry on the natural world. And at Samstag Museum, Direct, Directed, Directly employs performance, moving image, installation and sound to investigate the gap between what is said and what is heard.
South Australian Premier, Peter Malinauskas says: “With an exciting and diverse program lined up for 2025, Adelaide Festival continues to showcase why it’s not only a premier attraction for global audiences, but also a key driver of South Australia’s economy and tourism sector. My government is very proud to have provided additional resources to deliver an even better result for Australia’s flagship international festival, right here in Adelaide.”
Adelaide Festival runs from 28 February to 16 March 2025. Visit the website for full program details.
