Opera in danger of dying out, warns Adelaide Festival heavyweight Simon Stone

Poised to unveil his international opera hit, Innocence, at the Adelaide Festival, director Simon Stone warned the art form would soon die out if it failed to return to its ‘entertainment roots’

Opera director Simon Stone. Picture Matt Turner.

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Poised to unveil his international opera hit, Innocence, at the Adelaide Festival, director Simon Stone warned the art form would soon die out if it failed to return to its “entertainment roots” and appeal to average income earners and young people.

“If young people aren’t coming, (opera) will die out with the last generation of people who grew up watching it – and that will be soon,’’ the Australia-raised opera, theatre and screen director said.

Stone, who has just directed Oscar-nominated star Keira Knightley in the forthcoming Netflix murder mystery The Woman in Cabin 10, added: “You’ve got this paradox, which is that you want to keep opera relevant for the average human being”. But because the form’s large orchestras and casts made it expensive to stage, “you have to keep ticket prices high – and therefore, the average audience member is fairly elite”.

Innocence, the 2025 Adelaide Festival’s marquee event, is a contemporary opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho that deals with a highly topical issue – the aftermath of a mass school shooting.

The production – one of the strongest selling shows at this year’s festival and a co-production with State Opera South Australia – opens tonight (Friday) and heads to New York’s Metropolitan Opera after its SA outing.

Innocence has already won plaudits in Europe, the UK and the US, with The New York Times calling it “a masterpiece”.

Stone said Saariaho’s opera was “exciting, accessible … and a really great introduction to opera’’. He said it focused on “how you need to face the loss of someone in a truthful way in order to be able to find beauty in life again’’.

The opera takes place at a wedding where a family secret related to a past school shooting is revealed, recriminations abound and a young bride faces an agonising decision.

Stone, 40, established his directing career in Australia and is now in demand internationally in the opera, theatre and screen worlds. He joked that, as “an old socialist” he found the $2m-a-day Netflix shooting budget for The Woman in Cabin 10 “slightly terrifying, because you’re like, any seconds that I’m wasting here are a lot of money … I try to value money and I always have”.

In his 20s, the upstart theatre director raised eyebrows by claiming primary authorship of the Chekhov and Ibsen classics he rewrote for contemporary audiences – for example, The Cherry Orchard by Simon Stone after Anton Chekhov.

He also caused a stir when he told The Australian: “Every play ever written is a rewrite of something.” He also said “authorship only became sacrosanct when Walt Disney invented copyright”.

Stone claimed “the notion of there being a truly original idea is just rubbish”. He said Shakespeare and other classical writers drew heavily on existing stories.

The Adelaide Festival runs until March 16 and apart from Innocence, its fastest-selling shows are Trent Dalton’s Love Stories, the Beckett play Krapp’s Last Tape starring Irish actor Stephen Rea and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal performing the dance-theatre work Club Amour.