Adelaide Festival Australia’s International Festival.
Artistic
Director Brett Sheehy AO. Adelaide Festival Centre and various locations.
February 28 – March 16 2025. Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au. Phone: 1300 393
404 or Ticketek131246
Previewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Brett Sheehy Artistic Director of Adelaide Festival 2025 |
In August of this year Adelaide Festival director Ruth McKenzie CBE suddenly resigned her position to take up an exciting opportunity in the Department of Premier and Cabinet as Program Director, Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy. Adelaide Festival Corporation Chair, Tracy Whiting AM immediately rang former festival director Brett Sheehy AO to ask him to be the interim director until the Board could appoint a new director to undertake the 2026-2028 Adelaide Festivals. Semi-retired Sheehy accepted the role and immediately set about programming the remaining events. When I spoke with him about the 2025 festival to be held in Adelaide from February 28 – March 16, Sheehy told me that in the very short time that he had to programme a complete festival he had filled about two thirds or three fifths of the programme. Former co-directors Neil Armfield AO and Rachel Healey had previously locked in Kaija Saariaho’s contemporary opera Innocence and McKenzie had included Table Top Shakespeare and various other events. However, the bulk of the programming was left to Sheehy to organize.
The boundless energy and enthusiasm that has characterized his career as Artistic Director of the Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne international Festivals and the Melbourne Theatre Comany is as effusive as when I first interviewed Sheehy in 2006 when he assumed the position of Artistic Director of Australia’s premier and foremost arts festival. Even though he will relinquish his role at the end of March and return to his semi-retired lifestyle at his home in Leura in the Blue Mountains, he will have surely left an indelible mark of excellence on Adelaide’s 40th international arts festival. A browse through the festival’s website at www.adelaidefestival.com.au will reveal a staggering 65 events, 11 world premieres, 9 Australian premieres and 15 exclusives.
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| Kaija Saariaho's Innocence. Photo Jean-Louis Fernandez |
“Unequivocally I do think that you should be there at the opening. We have Innocence and we have Rocio Molina’s Caeda del Cielo (Fallen From Heaven) and we have Krapp’s Last Tape. They are all opening in that first section.” Sheehy says. Schooled under the mentorship of legendary arts festival director Leo Schofield, Sheehy became an avid proponent of contemporary opera. ” I think Innocence will be Australia’s opera event of the year. It’s a big claim but this towering work has been considered a masterpiece by opera lovers and critics alike around the world.” Sheehy is also a great fan of Australian ex pat director Simon Stone whose production of Thyestes wowed Adelaide audiences some festivals ago. As soon as Stone’s production of Innocence completes its season at the festival it moves to the Met in New York. “It’s international creds are impeccable” Sheehy says,” and people are coming from as far afield as Hong Kong, Wellingston, KL and Singapore to see it in Australia. ”The subject matter is so dark, a school shooting at an international school in Finland. However all of the great operas are based on dark themes. In the 21st century communities need to come together and deal with grief and loss. ”Under Stone’s direction Innocence is as much theatre as it is contemporary opera and many of the cast are first and foremost actors as well as singers.. ”If there is such a thing as a “Don’t miss” then Innocence would be that for me”
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| Stephen Rea in Krapp's Last Tape. Photo Pato Cassinoni |
Sheehy has been a Stephen Rea fan since he saw the Oscar winner’s performance in The Crying Game. He is therefore especially excited to invite Rea to Adelaide to perform the eponymous role in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. “When I saw him, I thought what an extraordinary actor.” Krapp’s last Tape is considered to be one of Beckett’s four masterpieces along with Happy Days, End Game and of course Waiting For Godot.” Audiences will be in for a real treat when the great Irish actor performs in the great Irish playwright’s iconic play. Krapp is 69 years old. Each year on his birthday he records his experiences. This particular year he plays back a tape from his younger days. He listens to his younger self and needs to marry his youthful dreams and aspirations with his older self. Rea, a devoted disciple of Beckett has also been taping himself and layers the performance with recordings of Beckett’s text lending the 55 minute performance a deeply personal touch. ”Rea is one of the great Irish actors,” Sheehy says, ”and for him to be in this great Irish play with himself as a younger man is spine-tinglingly extraordinary stuff”.
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| Rocio Molina in Caeda del Cielo. (Fallen From Heaven) |
For some people the sound of castanets and the clicking heels of the Flamenco dancer may send them insane, but the woman who made Mikhail Baryshnikov fall to his knees in homage will transfix audiences during the first week of the festival with her performance of Caeda del Cielo (Fallen From Heaven) Rocio Molina combines the classical art of Flamenco with contemporary dance from around the world. The show is essentially an examination of womanhood. As the production unfolds she plays various female archetypes. There is the mother, the lover, the moon goddess and the bondage dominatrix. ”This Adelaide exclusive just builds and builds. It’s a great piece about the strength of women. ”The Independent called Molina “Flamenco’s wildest radical, punk and glorious, a magnificent dancer whose range takes in the fiery intensity of traditional styles, surreal fantasy and unpredictable humour.”
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| Rhoda Roberts in My Cousin Frank. Photo: Kate Holmes |
Australian theatre and arts director Rhoda Roberts AO tells the story of My Cousin Frank. It is an extraordinary account of the life of Francis Roberts, Australia’s first indigenous Olympian. “Honest Frank” took part in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the welterweight division. He was also the youngest competitor in the boxing team. And yet in 1964, Roberts was prohibited from travelling on an Australian passport because aborigines were not regarded as Australian citizens. He therefore had to be allowed to travel with the team and sign a permission slip. “Here is an indigenous Australian, representing his country on the Olympic stage and receiving an invitation to dine with Emperor Hirohito and yet he was not able to go to Tokyo on an Australian Passport. Unbeliveable!” Sheehy exclaims. Performed in English and Bundjalung, My Cousin Frank is “a powerful narrative of resilience, identity and the pursuit of excellence in the face of adversity.”
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| ILBIJERRI Theatre Company in Big Name No Blanket Photo James Henry |
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| Club Amour - Pina Bausch Wuppertal Tanzteater |
Photo Evangelos Rodoulis
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| Trent Dalton's Love Stories Photo: Craig Wilkinson |
“What I can promise anyone who comes to Adelaide in March next year is that they will have an experience which is food for the soul not medicine for the sick.” I remind Sheehy that he once told me that Festival stands for feast and celebration. He still believes that. “ Even with the darkest works people step out of the theatre with their hearts lifted and their lives enriched. For Sheehy art is food for the spirit, “It’s nourishing, fulfilling, enjoyable, extraordinary – all of those things.“
Adelaide Festival The International Festival
February 28 – March 16 2025
www.adelaidefestival.com.au
