Adelaide Festival co-directors retire early to help new boss into the role

The team which has directed the past half-dozen Adelaide Festivals is taking early retirement to allow the new director to get a running start on next year’s event.

The Adelaide Festival’s co-artistic directors, Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy, are stepping aside 12 months early to help usher in a new creative boss.

UK-born Ruth Mackenzie CBE, who was in charge of the 2012 London Olympics cultural festival, will take on the high-profile role from the middle of the year.

She will present the 2024, 2025 and 2026 events, and finish off next year’s program, which is already 80 per cent complete.

The Festival’s longest-tenured artistic directors, Armfield and Healy have shared the position since 2015, with their first event in 2017.

Adelaide-born Healy said it had been a “great privilege” but now was the time to step back and assist with a smooth transition to a new director.

“With 80 per cent of the major events scheduled for the 2023 Adelaide Festival either confirmed or well advanced, we both realised it’s now possible to take a step back from the unrelenting intensity of both Covid pressures and festival programming,” she said.

The pair will pursue new opportunities while continuing to help Mackenzie with the 2023 program. Healy will remain based in Adelaide, while Armfield will head to New York to stage his new production of Hamlet, at the Metropolitan Opera, in May.

Adelaide Festival directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield. Picture: Adelaide Festival

Adelaide Festival's new artistic director, Ruth MacKenzie CBE

Mackenzie, who has also served as director of the Scottish Opera, Holland Festival and artistic director of the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, said she can’t wait to get to work in Adelaide.

“I have always admired enormously the Adelaide Festival. It has been brilliant at introducing outstanding talent who have grown into world stars, and this surely must continue to be a central strength,” she said.

“There is no better place to show how vital, innovative, inspiring, collaborative and responsible the arts can be than in Adelaide.”

Healy said Mackenzie will bring an “incredible black book” of top artists and performance companies.

“Ruth has had an extraordinary career as a global cultural leader and has worked in many creative contexts including the world of international arts festivals,” she said.

This year’s Adelaide Festival surpassed its box office target with just over $5m in ticket sales, while total attendance was almost 229,000 people across the 17-day event.

This is up from $3.7m and 61,000 tickets sold last year when venue capacities were capped at 50-75 per cent.

The box office figure includes umbrella events such as the State Theatre Company’s Girls and Boys and Konstantin Shamray and the ASQ, but not four-day Womadelaide in Botanic Park.

The festival will also welcome a new chief executive, Kath M Mainland, who will begin her role next month.