Adelaide Festival

Adelaide Festival — the country’s premier mainstage arts festival

Adelaide Festival is the largest curated mainstage arts festival in Australia, founded in 1960 as the country’s first international arts festival and run biennially until 2012, when it switched to an annual programme. The festival runs for two and a half weeks each year from late February into mid-March, with productions across opera, theatre, dance, music, visual art and contemporary cross-art-form work. It sits at the geographical and chronological centre of an extraordinary fortnight of overlapping festivals — the Adelaide Festival itself, the Adelaide Fringe (the second-largest fringe festival in the world after Edinburgh, running concurrently), Adelaide Writers’ Week, WOMADelaide and the Adelaide Cabaret Festival’s pre-season events. The combined audience across the four festivals exceeds three million attendances each year, in a city of 1.4 million.

What it’s known for

Adelaide Festival’s identity is curatorial — every programme is selected by an artistic director (or co-directors) on a three-year contract, and the festival’s reputation rests on the quality of those curatorial choices rather than on a fixed format or signature event. Recent artistic directors — Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield (2017–2023) and now Brett Sheehy and Dr Ali Mahmood — have built the festival’s contemporary international reputation through productions like the 2018 The Lehman Trilogy, the 2019 Romeo Castellucci Requiem, the 2020 Mozart’s Requiem with Anne-Sophie Mutter, the 2022 Garden of Earthly Delights commission, and the 2023 closing-night Ulysses staged production at the Festival Theatre.

If you can only go to one Australian arts festival, Anna’s standing recommendation is Adelaide Festival. The combination of the curatorial standard, the international programming, the festival-fringe overlap, and the scale of the public-realm work in the city centre makes Adelaide in early March the densest cultural fortnight in the country.

The programme pattern

A typical Adelaide Festival programme runs across approximately twenty mainstage productions plus an extensive contemporary music, free public-realm and visual arts programme. The mainstage selection typically includes one major contemporary opera commission or international touring opera, two or three international touring theatre productions (the Lehman Trilogy, an Ivo van Hove production, a Toneelgroep Amsterdam piece), three or four international dance productions (Rosas, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Akram Khan), a substantial chamber music programme curated in collaboration with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and the festival’s own commissions which often combine contemporary music, theatre and visual art.

Key venues

  • Adelaide Festival Centre — the festival hub. Festival Theatre, Dunstan Playhouse, Space Theatre, plus the outdoor Festival Plaza.
  • Adelaide Town Hall — used for the chamber music programmes.
  • Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide — second mainstage for theatre and opera.
  • The Anchorage at Glenelg, Riverside Precinct, and the festival-only outdoor venues built for specific productions.
  • The Adelaide Botanic Garden — site of WOMADelaide, the festival’s overlapping world music event.

How to plan a trip

Adelaide Festival rewards advance planning more than any other Australian arts event. The mainstage programme launches in late October each year — six weeks earlier than other major festivals — and the marquee productions sell out their best seats within forty-eight hours of programme launch. If you’re flying to Adelaide for the festival, lock the trip in late October when the programme drops; book accommodation at the same time (Adelaide hotels in Festival fortnight quote double the rest-of-year rate, and the city is small — anything later than November and you’re staying in suburbs).

Pair the festival with the Adelaide Fringe (running concurrently, free programme launches in October — buy single tickets close to the time as Fringe runs much longer and availability is better) and Adelaide Writers’ Week (runs on a single weekend in early March, free entry, massive programme). The combined fortnight gives you mainstage international productions, fringe comedy and contemporary work, and free literary programming in a single trip.

Recent highlights

The 2018 Australian premiere of The Lehman Trilogy with Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles. The 2019 Castellucci Requiem. The 2020 Anne-Sophie Mutter chamber programme. The 2022 Garden of Earthly Delights Festival commission. The 2023 closing-night staged Ulysses by Olwen Fouéré. The 2024 international touring of the Akram Khan Jungle Book Reimagined.

Useful links

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