Adelaide Festival appoints Britain’s Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director

A ‘powerhouse’ of the British and European arts sector, Ruth Mackenzie promises to build on the success of Adelaide Festival’s Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield.

New Adelaide Festival director Ruth Mackenzie. Picture: Adam Lawrence

The new head of the Adelaide Festival, British arts executive Ruth Mackenzie, regards running a cultural institution as a “public service” – different from hospitals and schools, but a duty to the community.

Mackenzie, 64, has run many arts organisations as artistic or executive director, including the London 2012 Festival, the Manchester International Festival, the Holland Festival, and the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris.

She will move to Adelaide in November and succeed co-­directors Neil Armfield and ­Rachel Healy, who in six iterations of the Adelaide Festival have doubled the box office and raised the festival’s international stature.

“I’m coming in to build on the incredible position that the festival is in, thanks to Rachel and Neil,” Mackenzie said from London. “The figures are amazing and the quality is amazing. This is about carrying on down that road.”

Mackenzie’s appointment was announced by Adelaide Festival chair Judy Potter, who ­described her as a “powerhouse of the British and European festival and arts communities”.

The announcement comes as Armfield and Healy plan to step back earlier than expected from full-time involvement with the festival. Because the pandemic has delayed several productions already planned, their final program for 2023 is largely in place.

Armfield is about to direct Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet – seen in Adelaide in 2018 – for New York’s Metropolitan, and Healy has a project in Sydney yet to be announced.

Mackenzie’s most recent role, appointed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, has been to help reactivate the city’s cultural and hospitality sectors as they ­recover from the pandemic.

From 2017 to August 2020, she was artistic director of the Chatelet in Paris, an appointment that ended with her “brutal” sacking and accusations of managerial and financial problems – claims which, she said at the time, were unproven.

While Mackenzie is now prevented from speaking about her departure from the theatre, she said she was proud of the changes she made there. “We began to ­explore new ways to work as a theatre in the centre of town, with lots of different artists and different communities,” she said. “That was very exciting, and it’s continuing.”

She had not previously visited Adelaide until this year, and is looking forward to finding collaborative partners in the local community.