Festival of ‘little offshoots’ to give homegrown plays a second life beyond Mad March
As they prepare to part ways with their heritage-listed venue, Goodwood Theatre owners Simone Avramidis and Chris Iley have tapped a series of local creatives to bring life to a relatively “dead month” in Adelaide’s theatre calendar.
The audiences of Adelaide are used to attending their festivals in March, often gravitating to the eastern side of the CBD. The artists of Adelaide, however, are at their craft all year round, working hard on new shows that might only get one bite of the apple during Fringe time.
Chris Iley and Simone Avramidis, the owners of Goodwood Theatre and Studios, are working to change that dynamic with the upcoming return of their mini-festival, COMEBACK, in August.
COMEBACK first launched in 2020, not long after Iley and Avramidis purchased the heritage-listed former Goodwood Institute at the onset of the Covid pandemic. While Covid had left Iley and Avramidis unsure of how they would pay their mortgage, as the year slowly went by and Adelaide started to open up again the pair worked to find a way to encourage people to come back to their venue – not only to keep the theatre afloat, but to rebuild the local artistic community.
“The idea was that we will invite all the companies that have worked with us in the past to come back and do a one-off show,” says Avramidis.
The first festival took place in August of that year, with every night sold out. COMEBACK has since been revisited in different iterations in the years since.
“We sort of changed the idea of COMEBACK slightly, and it was less about bringing audience back, and more about bringing shows that have had a life before back,” says Avramidis. “It was about, ‘Okay, how do we actually generate more of an audience for these young companies?’
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“They’ve taken a risk, they’ve had an idea, they’re put on a show, and then, because they don’t have a following, they have got a few people coming – but not as many as they deserve.”
COMEBACK Festival 2026 has its own distinct format, with audiences being invited to see two shows on one night at the same venue. Over the three weeks, the festival will showcase productions from six companies.
The ‘two-shows-one-night’ idea came from Avramidis’ own experience of seeing Fringe shows back-to-back, and the overpowering post-show urge to discuss what she’d witnessed before leaving the venue.
“I realised you don’t want to just go home and unpack that at home – you really need to have your community around you to have these discussions before you get in the car.”
The concept then expanded beyond just the shows.
“We thought, ‘Why don’t we do some dinner as well?’
“Let’s make this a little sort of moment where audiences could see a show, come out, have dinner, have conversations, speak with like-minded people, potentially meet the artists, and then go in and see another show that is a different genre, but touches on very similar elements.”
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The shows are grouped based on their themes or underlying discourse. Avramidis describes the first week as “tender”, featuring Wilde and Darling Productions’ Goddess Era, which draws inspiration from women of Ancient Greek mythology, and Alix Kuijpers’ I Know The End, an award-winning queer coming-of-age dance theatre work, with the hope this combination brings in new audience demographics.
“An audience that would often go to a dance performance are now potentially going to see a show before that which is a theatre production, and it’s fantastic for both companies,” says Avramidis.
Week two will see Bang On The Nerve: A Modern Asian-Australian Adaptation from local artists Danielle Lim and Sam Lau standing alongside Zero Theatre’s Have Sex With Me, Please.
“I would call the second week ‘playful’,” says Avramidis.
To round out COMEBACK is a week labelled as “experimental”: Deus Ex Femina’s All the Things I Couldn’t Say will pair with Billie-Rose Russell’s All Grown Up (but not really), presented in partnership with Dead Darling Theatre.
Avramidis says what makes COMEBACK unique is that the festival asks artists to support one another.
“We don’t often get that in our industry,” she says. “I mean, we try to, but the idea is that we really aren’t just pushing our own show, but we’re actually pushing the whole festival because audiences will come for both productions [on the one night].”
This, for Iley and Avramidis, is part of a broader goal of making the industry more sustainable for emerging artists and helping them build an audience outside of ‘Mad March’.
“We can create these little offshoots in a time where there isn’t much happening in Adelaide… August, it’s a bit of a dead month,” she says.
Since announcing the 2026 COMEBACK program, Iley and Avramidis have recently announced that they will be selling Goodwood Theatre and Studios, with mystery buyers set to be handed the keys later this year. The news means COMEBACK’s comeback will also be a moment of farewell for Iley and Avramidis, and renewal for the venue and the local theatre community it serves.
“We actually need to be creating these little pockets throughout the year,” Avramidis tells InReview. “To put all of your eggs into one basket – i.e. the Fringe – I don’t believe it’s healthy. I don’t think it’s supporting our artists in the best way that we could.”
COMEBACK Festival runs from August 13 – 30
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