Adelaide Festival 2025 Program
Photo credit: Roy VanDerVegt
65 events, 11 world premieres, 9 Australian premieres and 15 exclusives
Adelaide Festival has announced its 40th program, promising a suite of international and Australian productions and artists which will further enhance its 65-year reputation as Australia’s premier international festival.
For 2025, Adelaide Writers’ Week, WOMADelaide, Chamber Landscapes and Daylight Express will return and next year will see a new festival hub, The Courtyard. Located on the Festival Plaza, this new meeting place will offer food, drinks, and nightly programming from Wednesday to Sunday evenings.
The Festival kicks off with the epic, international thriller Innocence. Following its sellout triumph at the Royal Opera Covent Garden, and immediately before its New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera, this epic opera production has its exclusive Australian season in the 2025 Festival. Already being hailed as the greatest opera of the 21st Century, a “masterpiece” (The New York Times and Evening Standard), “an astonishing creation” (The Telegraph) and “a triumph” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Image: Innocence. Photographer: Jean-Louis Fernandez
Innocence is directed by Australian director Simon Stone who returns after 2018’s sold-out production of Thyestes. This contemporary tale of morality and mortality by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen features Teddy Tahu Rhodes along with international opera stars Sean Panikkar, Jenny Carlstedt, Tuomas Pursio and Claire de Sevigne. The score will be performed by Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs, with a combined chorus of 32 Adelaide Chamber Singers and State Opera South Australia Chorus members.
Also for the opening weekend, there’s still time to register to be part in the 30-minute dusk ‘happening’ in Elder Park, with the world premiere of Stephanie Lake Company’s MASS MOVEMENT on Saturday 1 March at 7pm, co-commissioned with The Australian Ballet. Over 1000 dancers ranging in age from 12 to 88 and representing a diverse mix of dance styles will come together for a one-time-only free performance.
Image: Brett Sheehy. Photographer: Lachlan Woods
Adelaide Festival Artistic Director Brett Sheehy AO says: “I’m 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’. I want to thank my predecessors in this role – Ruth Mackenzie CBE, Neil Armfield AO and Rachel Healy – who set the groundwork with their prior commitments to several productions, and 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 artforms 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.”
Recurring themes in the 2025 program include:
Image: Trent Dalton’s Love Stories. Photographer: Craig Wilkinson
A tribute to love, in its various forms with the Adelaide premiere of two of the theatre and literary worlds’ highly anticipated shows – the stage adaptation of Trent Dalton’s Love Stories – and the profoundly moving Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the Absent, Dorcy Rugamba’s spoken love letters to his family members, heartlessly killed in a matter of minutes during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Club Amour performed by legendary German dance company Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal is a triptych of works dedicated to love and desire. As well, a no-holds-barred exploration of the human condition sees Samuel Barnett playing a professionally neurotic stand-up comedian in search for Mr Right in Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible is Going To Happen, and Camille O’Sullivan presents Loveletter – a deeply personal tribute to two dear-departed friends, Shane McGowan of The Pogues and Sinéad O’Connor.
International artists making their Adelaide Festival debut include acclaimed Irish actor Stephen Rea in Krapp’s Last Tape; Spanish flamenco dancer Rocío Molina in Caída del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven); and Polish pianist, composer and singer Hania Rani. While after more than a decade, Serbian musical virtuoso Goran Bregović returns to the Festival stage blending his Sarajevo roots with Balkan folk, rock, and classical influences, accompanied by his Wedding and Funeral Band.
A deep dive into little-known First Nations stories with My Cousin Frank, as Australian writer and performer Rhoda Roberts AO takes a seat onstage to share the remarkable journey of her cousin, Australia’s first Aboriginal Olympian, a boxer who competed at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. An Australian premiere nyilamum – song cycles performed by the Australian String Quartet intertwines ancient stories and language with contemporary reflections on land, identity, and resilience. Featuring music by Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung woman Dr Lou Bennett AM and renowned Australian composer Paul Stanhope.
Visitors and families of all ages are invited to explore the Port Adelaide region through The Walking Track, a free, immersive guided experience created by Vitalstatistix, led by Karul Projects' Thomas E S Kelly and offering perspectives on place, culture and connection.
Image: Big Name No Blankets. (L-R)-Tibian Wyles, Baykali Ganambarr, Teangi Knox, Taj Pigram, Jackson Peele. Photographer: James Henry
Finally, two works taking an in-depth retrospective look are Big Name No Blankets, the history of the Warumpi Band; and A Quiet Language celebrates 60 years of Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), Australia’s longest-running contemporary dance company. This milestone production is co-choreographed by ADT’s current Artistic Director, Wiradjuri man Daniel Riley, and the company’s founder Elizabeth Cameron Dalman OAM.
Choreographer Lucy Guerin, last seen at Adelaide Festival with 2018’s Split, returns with her c male-female dance duet One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything. Also making a welcome return to Adelaide is Seann Miley Moore, who played the Engineer in Opera Australia’s Miss Saigon earlier this year. Now, Moore takes on the role of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in the rock musical.
Familiar stories take on a new life in War of the Worlds, performed simultaneously by youth theatre groups in Whyalla, Barmera and Bendigo; and the second fairytale in Slingsby’s trilogy of works-in-development, The Giant’s Garden, offers a fresh reimagining of The Selfish Giant. American singer-songwriter Cat Power will recreate live on stage both her 2023 album and Bob Dylan’s 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert album in Cat Power Sings Dylan. And celebrating 40 years performing together, the UK’s Forced Entertainment returns with Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare. This production reenacts all 36 of Shakespeare’s plays in individual 45-60 minute performances, featuring everyday objects as characters – who wouldn’t want to see Hamlet portrayed by a bottle of vinegar?
Classical music performances include a lineup of 17 artists at Elder Hall during the convenient midday timing in the Daylight Express series. Chamber Landscapes at UKARIA also returns, curated by artistic director David Harrington of The Kronos Quartet. For the 2025 program, Harrington has selected the theme of “Horizons” showcasing an internationally diverse program of musicians from various backgrounds.
For the first time, Adelaide Festival will also present Dialogues in Sound: The Chamber Landscapes Gala, featuring an ensemble of this year’s musicians, from Australia, Vietnam, Mali and Indonesia, sharing the state for astonishing interpretations and reinventions of western classical music.
Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov and German baritone Matthias Goerne will appear at both Adelaide Town Hall and UKARIA in two concerts celebrating the music of Franz Schubert. The first concert will feature Schubert’s 21st and final Piano Sonata alongside his song cycle, Schwanengesang. The second concert will be dedicated to Schubert’s song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin.
Image: Adelaide Chamber Singers. Photographer: Dave Pascoe
Adelaide Chamber Singers will perform Heal You, and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (ASO) encourages audiences to bring their yoga mats to the Grainger Studio for a tranquil, peaceful audience experience in the almost-dark with Sanctuary Series – Echoes. The ASO will also perform two separate concerts celebrating women composers from Australia, the UK, the USA, Russia, Mexico and Finland in their Light – Song concert series. Songstress Jess Hitchcock joins forces with Penny Quartet for Musica Viva’s evening of music through the looking glass of eleven Australian composers, each commissioned to arrange one of Jess’s songs.
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas MP 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.”
Minister for Arts Andrea Michaels MP says: “Adelaide Festival is South Australia’s premier arts festival and it’s fantastic to be announcing a spectacular program for 2025 as we celebrate its 40th year. The Malinauskas Government has invested an additional $2.3 million to bring major international events to South Australia as part of Adelaide Festival and this year, that money is going toward bringing us the opera Innocence which will make its exclusive Australian debut. In addition to Innocence, the program contains other stellar international performances, artists and authors, alongside incredible South Australian talent and I’d like to congratulate Brett, Ruth, Kath and the entire team on producing it.”
Adelaide Writers’ Week returns from 1 – 6 March featuring a lineup of authors including Geraldine Brooks, Helen Garner, Kevin Rudd and Jessie Tu. In dedicated author ticketed events, Marcus Zusak will celebrate 20 years since the publication of The Book Thief; Tim Winton will discuss writing, climate change and the fate of the planet, as outlined in his 13th novel, Juice; and drama and crime writers Andrew Knight and Anthony Horowitz will discuss mysteries, murder and mayhem.
In a lively debate, team captains Annabel Crabb and David Marr will tackle the question of whether “true friends stab you in the front” as Oscar Wilde famously said. Other ticketed events will focus on The United States’ place in the world (ABC 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson and editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick); Islamophobia (Waleed Aly and Susan Carland); Antisemitism (Sir Simon Schama); uses and abuses of language in Kyiv, Mar-a-Lago and Gaza (Masha Gessen); and ultimate stories of blunders, both other peoples’ and individual (Richard Fidler, Sarah Kanowski and a stellar cast of authors). Don’t miss the inaugural Adelaide Writers’ Week Quiz Night, hosted by Shaun Micallef promising an evening of literary trivia, or Insiders hosted by David Speers, and the daily news discussion each morning, Breakfast with Papers.
Adelaide Writers’ Week Director Louise Adler AM says: ”The literary critic John Carey once wrote that good literature “doesn’t tell you what the truth is, but rather makes you feel what it would be like to know it". The writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry joining us at AWW25 are therefore, unsurprisingly, focused on discontent in ourselves as individuals, within families, and beyond to within communities and between nation states. The 2025 festival will take place in the aftermath of the US and UK elections and the forthcoming elections in Europe and Australia. Writers' attention will necessarily turn to the role of language in a political landscape which appears, paradoxically, to be characterised by deepening divisions and at the same time consensus among a political class committed to the status quo. Adelaide Writers’ Week has long been able to host civil and generous conversations that inform, engage and inspire our audience and in these turbulent times, will continue that tradition.”
Discount ticket schemes for those facing a financial barrier include continuing established Festival initiatives Tix for Next to Nix and Pay What You Can, thanks to The Balnaves Foundation, and inclusive equity program for category 1 – 4 schools, Festival Connect, thanks to the James & Diana Ramsay Foundation, SA Power Networks, Waternish and Adelaide Festival Benefactors.
The 40th Adelaide Festival runs over 17 days and nights from Friday 28 February to Sunday 16 March, 2025. Adelaide Writers’ Week runs from Saturday 1 to Thursday 6 March and the full program will be announced in January 2025.
BOOKINGS (on sale from 9am ACST / 9:30am AEDT, Monday 4 November): adelaidefestival.com.au or 1300 393 404.
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