How new Adelaide Festival director Ruth Mackenzie is keeping taxpayers happy

Her plan of attack? It’s simple: Everyone in SA pays for the Adelaide Festival (if they pay their taxes) so we need to be serving them, she says. Here’s how she plans to do so.

New Adelaide Festival artistic director Ruth Mackenzie intends to build on the solid foundations established by her predecessors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy in her own programs from 2024 to 2026 – but she also wants to push the festival’s reach out to new audiences.

“For much of my life, I’ve been brought in as the fireman or the paramedic, to revive (an event),” McKenzie says.

“Why would I come in and change a success? I’m going to build on a success.

“So the first thing that I did was get the flagship operas in place for ’24, ’25 and ’26, because you don’t get last-minute international hit operas. We’ve worked to make sure that we’ve got those tentpoles … and that they offer lots of points of debate and discussion with other artists who might be coming.”

Mackenzie’s parents were journalists, and novelists. “I lived in South Africa until I was three years old. All through my childhood I assumed I was going to be a journalist and an activist.”

Her parents were also anti-apartheid activists, and her mother was imprisoned after protests over the 1960 Sharpeville massacre: “When they got Mum out of prison, we legged it to London. I thought that every child went every weekend to Trafalgar Square to listen to lots of long speeches and protest against South Africa House.”

Adelaide Festival’s artistic director Ruth Mackenzie. Picture: Andrew Beveridge

They also took Ruth to a performance by Benjamin Britten’s professional children’s choir, which she then joined before going on to Cambridge University, “where you can’t study the arts – but you can do them”.

The Festival has also appointed Netherlands-based Wouter Van Ransbeek – an industry colleague of Mackenzie’s since her time as a dramaturg with the Vienna Festival – as its Europe-based associate director to source shows there.

But Mackenzie also wants to bring the talent search closer to home.

“Two things we talked about in my interview were the importance of First Nations artists, and artists from other under-represented communities in Australia, and artists in SA who are international artists … and how we should be showing off and developing the opportunities of all those Australian artists.”

When Mackenzie was controversially dismissed from her previous role at Paris’s Theatre du Chatelet in 2020, it was suggested the issues – which remain subject to a nondisclosure agreement – revolved around her attempts to broaden its reach beyond traditional audiences.

She expects such efforts will be more warmly received here.

“There’s a really simple objective. Everyone in SA pays for the Adelaide Festival, if they pay their taxes. So what are we giving them? Kath (Mainland, the festival’s new chief executive) and I are both from public service traditions in the UK … for both of us there is a really clear objective, which is that everyone in SA should benefit from the Adelaide Festival.

“Everyone’s invested in it, so we need to be serving all those communities,” she says.