Simon Stone to headline Adelaide Festival amid internal turmoil
One of the country’s most talented and controversial directors will headline the 2025 Adelaide Festival, the prestigious arts jamboree in turmoil after the resignation of its much-vaunted international director.
The one-time enfant terrible of Australian theatre, Simon Stone, will be the star attraction at next year’s Adelaide Festival, as the country’s premier cultural event grapples with the recent shock resignation of its director just weeks before the organisation is expected to post an annual financial loss.
Innocence, an opera about a Helsinki school shooting directed by Stone – who famously left Australia in 2014 to pursue an international career amid controversy over his radical adaptations of classical works – will headline the 2025 AF under the direction of caretaker boss Brett Sheehy.
The experienced Sheehy has replaced Ruth Mackenzie, the vaunted British arts tsar and director who earlier this month unexpectedly left the top job to take a position with SA Arts Minister Andrea Michaels. Mackenzie’s defection to become program director of arts, culture and creative industries policy within the South Australian Department of the Premier and Cabinet was not linked to the organisation’s financial results, an Adelaide Festival spokeswoman said.
The appointment in 2022 of Mackenzie, a former adviser to the Blair government and director of London Festival, to the country’s oldest and most prestigious arts jamboree made international headlines. There were in the industry high hopes to continue the success and relative stability of her predecessors, Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy, whose seven-year co-directorship delivered a more than 100 per cent increase in box office attendance and a 785 per cent increase in philanthropic giving.
Mackenzie’s 2024 program reportedly achieved record attendance results of 555,000 and was critically well received.
Adelaide Festival is funded annually to the tune of $8.9m, with an additional $2.3m announced last year to be injected into the program across three years.
A spokeswoman said the organisation would post its 2023-04 financial results in coming weeks and that it was “likely the Adelaide Festival will post a deficit but will be able to draw on its own reserves to address the budget shortfall”.
Mackenzie’s five-year contract had included programs for 2025 and 2026. Sheehy – arguably the country’s most experienced festival director, having previously been director for the Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne iterations — will oversee those programs. An international search for new director from 2026 is under way, The Australian understands.
Sheehy on Monday thanked Armfield and Healy for securing the Stone-directed Innocence, which has been critically acclaimed at opera houses around the world, and recalled Stone’s nascent promise.
“I remember with awe Simon’s brilliant, genre-breaking realisation of The Cherry Orchard for my 2014 Melbourne Theatre Company season, before he began his stellar international career,” said Sheehy.
The Cherry Orchard was a lightning rod for Australian theatre. That production, described in its brochure as being “By Simon Stone, after Anton Chekhov”, raised eyebrows among many the industry. Said playwright David Williamson at the time: “It did take me aback a little to see Chekhov relegated to an afterthought in the title. Such is the star status that someone like Simon Stone can command.”
Stone went on to raise ire with similar descriptions of works by Ibsen and Strindberg, telling this newspaper at the time: “I’m stealing whatever I need to steal and corrupting whatever I need to corrupt to entertain an audience.”
He left Australia for Basel, the European city of his birth, to become a regular director at the famous Theater Basel and at many theatres across the continent. Based for much of that time in Vienna, Stone made his directorial film debut with The Daughter in 2015 and later made the Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes-led The Dig. His radical 2022 Lucia de Lammermoor at New York’s Metropolitan Opera received mixed reviews but it didn’t stop general manager Peter Gelb programming Stone’s Innocence for its prestigious company’s 2025-26 season.
Adelaide will host the work – written by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and which had its debut at Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021 – ahead of New York. Baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes has been confirmed as one of its stars.
Club Amour, a work by internationally acclaimed German dance company Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, secured by Mackenzie during her brief tenure, will also feature in next year’s Adelaide Festival, while Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre will celebrate its 60th anniversary year with A Quiet Language under the direction of Daniel Riley.
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