Adelaide Festival to open next February with reduced international program

Neil Armfield's opera production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an Adelaide Festival centrepiece.

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

The nation’s premier arts festival, the Adelaide Festival, will go ahead next February but with a downscaled program of international artists because of expected travel restrictions and a $3m budget hole due to reduced seating ­requirements.

Festival directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield on Tuesday revealed the festival’s opera centrepiece, an international production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which involves an Australian creative team and performers.

But a production planned as part of Adelaide’s partnership with the Aix-en-Provence festival in France has been postponed, and another international event involving performers from Africa also is off the table.

Healy said the pandemic had forced festival organisers to think differently, and next year’s program would involve “international gestures” rather than many full-scale productions. Some events would involve digital streaming.

“As a proportion of the overall program it’s unrecognisable from a usual Adelaide Festival program, but it doesn’t mean there’s nothing,” she said of the international program. “There are about five or six events that could properly be described as international projects or international artists.”

Armfield said the reopening of the SA-NSW border was a “massive relief” because almost 30 per cent of the Adelaide Festival’s audience travels from interstate.

But restrictions on theatre seating due to social distancing, limiting venues to 50 per cent ­capacity, had left the festival with a $3m budget shortfall.

Armfield first directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Houston Grand Opera in the US in 2009. His production will be mounted in Adelaide with an Australian cast, and with US countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen as Oberon.

A highlight of the opera is the 24 children who play the ­fairies in the enchanted forest, who will be cast from the Young Adelaide Voices.

“It’s a work about the act of creating theatre, and it’s some of the most beautiful music that Britten ever wrote,” Armfield said.

“At a time when we have been through a year of horror, a work about transformation and joy seemed too good to pass up.”

The 2020 Adelaide Festival was ­affected by the emerging coronavirus crisis back in March when disruptions to international travel affected some freight and performers.

A concert by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra involved a change of conductor when Brett Dean was diagnosed with coronavirus and was hospitalised.

But Armfield said the festival was lucky that the full 2020 program could be rolled out before lockdowns started, three hours after the festival’s conclusion.