Three mind-bending productions offer a first taste of Adelaide Festival 2027
Kafka, Greek tragedy and opera collide in an opening line-up designed to push boundaries, challenge expectations and leave a lasting impression.
If you like your theatre and opera a little less predictable, Adelaide Festival 2027 is already giving you a reason to pay attention.
Three major productions have been revealed ahead of the festival’s full program launch on October 27: Romeo Castellucci’s Bluebeard’s Castle, K. by Barrie Kosky and Robert Icke’s Oedipus.
They’re three very different takes on big, unsettling stories – but all share a taste for spectacle, striking imagery and questions that don’t come with easy answers.
For Adelaide Festival artistic director Matthew Lutton, they’re also a deliberate preview of what’s coming next year.
“These three works are large-scale, visually spectacular productions, rich in emotional force and theatrical invention,” he says. “Each one opens up some of the festival’s central questions about truth and lies – how truth can unsettle us how lies can comfort us, and how art can reveal the murky space between the two.”
First up is Bluebeard’s Castle, Romeo Castellucci’s visually arresting take on Béla Bartók’s operatic masterpiece.
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Forget the traditional castle setting. Castellucci puts audiences inside Judith’s psychological journey as she opens seven forbidden doors, with a water-filled stage and eruptions of fire creating a world that’s as surreal as it is spectacular.
“For Castellucci, Bluebeard’s Castle is among his most emotionally powerful productions,” Lutton says. “The singers never leave the stage, and through them he excavates an extraordinarily poetic psychological landscape.”
It’s Castellucci’s third Adelaide Festival appearance, following Go Down Moses and Mozart’s Requiem, and runs at the Festival Theatre from February 26 to March 2.
Then there’s K. by Barrie Kosky, a wild theatrical reworking of Franz Kafka’s The Trial.
Created with actors from Berlin’s legendary Berliner Ensemble and a live band, K. throws theatre, dance, music and vaudeville into Kafka’s nightmarish world of bureaucracy, guilt and paranoia.
For Lutton, it also marks an exciting return to Kosky’s theatrical roots – and his first theatre work in Australia since The Tell-Tale Heart in 2010.
“I have never seen Kafka’s The Trial brought to life in this way,” he says. “The production is full of humour, danger, mischief and a very specific Jewish sensibility that, in a contradictory way, makes it feel deeply universal.”
K. hits Her Majesty’s Theatre from March 4-7.
Rounding out the early announcements is Robert Icke’s Oedipus, a contemporary reworking of the Greek tragedy about power, prophecy and the catastrophic consequences of discovering the truth.
Rather than simply importing Icke’s existing production, Lutton is bringing the director to Australia to rebuild it with some of the country’s leading actors.
“It is bound to resonate with our current political landscape,” he says.
Together, the three productions offer a pretty strong indication that Adelaide Festival 2027 won’t be playing it safe.
“They signal a festival of scale, ambition and invention,” Lutton says. “Adelaide Festival 2027 is interested in the unreal: in artists who use the surreal, the poetic, the fantastical and the epic to ask questions we often do not have the time or energy to ask in our dogged daily lives.”
The full program drops on October 27, with the festival running from February 26 to March 14.
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