Theatre Reviews Adelaide

★★★★★ Before Logan St begins, its audience is asked to speak. Across a floor-to-ceiling screen, Uncle Lewis O’Brien and Aunty Lynette Crocker welcome us to Kaurna Yarta. Matt Byrne’s camera moves through the landscape, capturing burbling streams and smoke curling…

★★★★½ A red petrol pump stands at stage left. It looks like scenery, a piece of period detail. Then you remember Chekhov: do not place a gun on stage unless somebody is going to use it. Opera Australia’s touring Don…

★★★★★ “Sit anywhere you like. Just don’t step on the dirt.” It is the first instruction audiences receive on entering the AC Arts Main Theatre. Three islands of red earth spread across the floor before the stage. Two more sit…

★★★★½ Peter Goers may be one of the few Adelaide performers who could walk on stage as Sheridan Whiteside and make the audience feel the casting joke before the first barb has fully landed. Following his successful return to the…

★★★★★ Before Postmodern Jukebox’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival set, a voice from the crowd yelled out: “Willie!” It was not a random heckle. It was a greeting. Willie Jay Moore Jr had not yet been handed his big solo moment. He…

★★★★☆ Dylan Adler arrives at the grand piano in a purple and white kimono. As a classically trained pianist, Adler has spent much of his life at the keyboard. But in Haus of Dy-lan, the piano isn’t just an instrument: it…

★★★★★ Natalie Gamsu’s cabaret, A Voice Like Shrapnel, is a masterclass in storytelling. Offering a raw reflection on her life and hard-won journey towards self-acceptance, Gamsu delves deep into her past with grit and startling honesty. Co-written by Ash Flanders and director Stephen…

★★★★★ At the centre of Em Rusciano’s Addicted To Love sits a giant heart made of roses. Roses climb the microphone stands like ivy. Rusciano herself prowls the stage with a handheld rose microphone that droops, swings and flops with…

★★★★★ In Eels’ Climbing To The Moon, Mark Oliver Everett sings of the self becoming blurred: where one person ends, and what others are making of them begins. It could almost be an unofficial epigraph for The Almighty Sometimes, presented…

★★★★½ Friendship can survive distance. It can survive new jobs, new partners, fluctuating bank balances and the slow indignities of middle age. Whether it can survive a white painting is another question. Yasmina Reza’s ART, first staged in Paris in…

★★★★★ Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened on 14 February 1895. That same night, the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, attempted to storm the theatre and hurl a bouquet of rotten…

★★★★★ There’s a white chair. A white telephone. Both sit on a plinth, waiting. So is she. Ruth Bader Ginsburg waits for the call that will change everything. The appointment. The moment history tips. The play begins here, in stillness,…

★★★★☆ Anyone who has sat on a local board or committee of any hue, be it the Lions, community radio or amateur theatrics will recognise the world of Australia Day. Before a word is spoken, the set does the work.…

★★★★★ You may not know who the killer is, but Cluedo knows exactly what it is. And crucially, unlike its colourful cast of villains, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Based on the cult 1985 film written by Jonathan…

★★★★☆ They’ve been creating music, travelling the world and breaking hearts for twelve years. Now, it’s time to say goodbye forever. Welcome to the final show of the Fuccbois Farewell Tour (NO encores). Your favourite heartthrobs, Brendan, Brandon, Tyler and Also…

★★★★★ There’s a moment, about ten minutes from the end of Trophy Boys, where the laughter stops. Not fades. Stops. The room goes silent. Pin-drop silent. You can feel the audience recalibrating in real time. What began as a sharp,…

★★★★★ Ghost stories usually begin with a flicker of candlelight or a creaking door. Corpse, the new show from comedian Kirsty Mann, begins in darkness. Total darkness. Then something crawls. A figure moves slowly down the aisle between two rows…

★★★★☆ The stage begins almost empty. A giant screen glows softly at the back of the Festival Theatre stage. Against it stands the regal silhouette of Isabelle Huppert as Mary, Queen of Scots. The image is stark. The figure is…

★★★★☆ Inside Gluttony’s Gosling tent, detective Agatha Crusty reclines on a chaise armchair with her nose buried in a book. It’s a neat piece of scene-setting. We are in the 1930s. Somewhere in the room lurks her Watson-like sidekick, Jerkins.…

★★★★★ Sport and theatre rarely share the same stage. Funding debates rage. Value debates rage. Is art more important than sport? Does sport unite more than art? When the two worlds do collide, it is often through failure: the fallen…

★★★★★ BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG arrives in Adelaide after a sell-out run at Edinburgh Fringe. It has collected five-star reviews and a Weekly Best of Theatre Award. The premise is deceptively simple. You walk in and it feels wrong. The house lights are…

★★★★½ Anton Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard in 1903. It premiered in Moscow in 1904 and was his final play. It arrived at a turning point in Russian history. Former serfs were rising. Aristocratic landowners were falling. The old order…

★★★★☆ When the audience files into Judy’s Room at Holden Street Theatres, Silenus is already there. Or rather, sprawled there. Passed out on the floor. Empty cans of Prancing Pony IPA and Tiger Beer litter the stage. A karaoke screen…

★★★★★ The hottest cabaret club East of Berlin has arrived in Adelaide, instantly cementing themselves in my eyes as the 5-star, unmissable show this Fringe season! Bernie Dieter’s Club Kabarett is a raunchy, mesmerising and welcoming escape that will have…

★★★★★ Oscar Wilde would have adored this chaos. Mistaken identity. Double lives. Social pretension. Air and graces. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest has always been about performance. About whom we pretend to be. About the masks we wear to…

There’s a pulse running through Holden Street Theatres this Adelaide Fringe season. It’s political without being preachy. Personal without being small. Across music, monologue and solo theatre, these works circle a common question: Who gets to belong and who decides…

Set within varied locations around the Bedford Park campus, Flinders University Drama Centre brings to life Medea In Exile. The work is an imagined continuation of Medea’s story, which is traditionally only glimpsed in various plays in Greek mythology. Students…

Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie in 1944. It was his breakout play, a memory-story that still cuts like shards eighty years later. Its themes never date. Hope, failure, guilt, fantasy, and the fragility of family bonds. State Theatre Company South Australia…

It’s been more than a century since melodrama ruled the stage, but there’s still something satisfying about seeing good triumph over evil while the audience boos lustily from the stalls.  Adrift in New York (or Her First False Step), written…

Mary Chase’s Harvey first charmed Broadway in 1944, winning the Pulitzer Prize and inspiring a beloved 1950 film starring James Stewart. Holden Street Theatres’ new staging, directed by Rosie Aust, revives that magic without dusting off its warmth. It proves that kindness…