Back to the future for new Adelaide Festival artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy

NEW Adelaide Festival artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy want to attract younger audiences by bringing back a digital version of the old Theatre Passport scheme which offered discount tickets.

26.1.2016.New Adelaide Festival artistic directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield over lunch at Sean's Kitchen, Skycity Adelaide Casino. pic tait schmaal.

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NEW Adelaide Festival artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy want to attract younger audiences by bringing back a digital version of the old Theatre Passport scheme which offered discount tickets for teenagers in the 1970s.

Big event operas and a stronger classical music program are also among the priorities for the incoming duo, who will program the 2017-19 Festivals.

Ms Healy, who grew up in Prospect and has just moved back from Sydney with her family to live in Stirling, said the original Theatre Passport scheme which ran from 1977 to 1992 had helped fuel her interest in the arts.

“One of the really wonderful innovations that came out of Adelaide in the 1970s that I would love to see in the Festival — or more broadly — was the Theatre Passport scheme,’’ she said.

“As a teenager you’d just turn up to a BASS outlet and you’d be able to buy a ticket from any of the unsold theatre stock for $1 … I think it went up to $5 eventually.

“It was an absolute catalyst for engagement with all sorts of art forms: opera, classical music, contemporary music, contemporary dance, theatre of every kind.’’

Opera, theatre and film director Mr Armfield said the passport scheme was a key part of the duo’s “pitch for the job” to build younger audiences. “One of the great things Rachel brings to the Festival … is a way of looking across a city at how the arts and culture can grow through all sorts of different policy directions,’’ Mr Armfield said.

Ms Healy was previously executive manager of culture for the City of Sydney, which had also adopted the passport idea as part of its action plan for the next 10 years.

While he would not usually program his own work, Mr Armfield said it had been “suggested by others and we are in the process of considering it”.

Mr Armfield has returned to London to direct The Judas Kiss, starring Rupert Everett, a job he was booked to do before he took on the Festival role and which will go on to Toronto and New York.

“A Festival should rightly reflect the tastes and enthusiasms of its artistic directors — and I think you’ll find that with us,’’ he said.

“I think we’re less likely to go down that area of (contemporary) musical exploration ... and there’ll be, to some extent, a return to a stronger classical component.

“But I wouldn’t say there won’t be surprises as well.’’