State Theatre of SA with Soft Tread Production in association with the Maye Pile. Space Theatre. 17 Mar 2026
This production rolls into town after successful runs around the country. For our happiness, two of its original. Melbourne cast have been supplanted by Adelaide-born actors - and jolly good they are, too.
Trophy Boys is a theatrical romp: fast, funny, and packed with rapid-fire socio-political substance. It follows four Year 12 boys at the prestigious (and gloriously named) St Imperium School, holed up in detention in the hour before an intercollegiate debate against their sister school. The twist is that the boys are played by girls. It’s drag — and it’s central to the show’s punch.
Playwright Emmanuelle Mattana has managed to blend slapstick humour with very serious subject matter. The twist is the gender bender.
In the opening stretch, the “boys” lock eyes with the audience, ham it up, and go to town with pelvic thrusts and raucous little dance breaks. They are vulgar and cocky. It quickly becomes clear they also are breathtakingly entitled — and expect little opposition from the girls’ team.
The debate topic — the status of feminism — gets both airtime and a send-up amid the rants and shtick. The set underlines the point with sledgehammer subtlety: huge portraits of famous women (Queen Elizabeth II, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jacinda Ardern) loom over large desks, chairs and a whiteboard. Everything is larger than life, like the characters and the show itself.
The acting is terrific. These are nasty boys who see themselves as future leaders: horny, hypocritical, loudmouthed. They’re also opportunistic weasels, and when the narrative turns darker and an ominous threat surfaces, their true colours show.
The play runs the emotional gamut and, under Marni Mount’s snappy direction, it does so at breakneck speed. It’s only 70 minutes long — though opening night was longer, after a rather whopping 15-minute late start.
Just when you begin to feel sympathy for one of them, there’s a catch; you leave the theatre admiring the character work while liking none of the characters. That’s oddly refreshing.
A well-lubricated young opening-night audience seemed to thrive on both the revue-like antics and the overall didacticism.
This is the sort of daring theatrical playground which promises to draw a that fresh demographic through the door, and that’s a good thing — and it’s also wonderful to see a crowd having fun while performers so skilfully stretch binaries.
There’s no star; it’s an ensemble. Myfanwy Hocking is superbly committed as Owen, the smart scholarship kid — though, by the end of the day, he’s smarter than he is kind. Tahlia Jameson provides a sharp contrast as Scott, living behind a butch veneer. Kidaan Zelleke, as the debate supervisor (not a team member), punctures the prize of privilege with a moving scene about the dubious joys of extreme wealth. Fran Sweeney-Nash plays the audience like a proverbial instrument as Jared, the athletic, uber-straight lad: a lovely comic talent, and the direction lets them shine.
Would this play work if boys were playing boys? It’s an interesting question — probably not. The girls have it. And even if, structurally, it’s essentially an extended revue sketch, it remains provocative, funny, and disgracefully wholesome.
Samela Harris
When: 17 Mar to 2 Apr
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: my.statetheatrecompany.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Mortlock Library at The Courtyard of Curiosities. 17 Mar 2026
A retelling of the ancient Greek myth, told by one Storyteller and one Musician.
It’s been performed in cafes, shops, gardens, homes, boats, tents, lanes, fields, caves, and a very occasional theatre.
Over 500 performances across four continents since its creation in 2016.
While one has not been as active as is customary this Fringe, I have been privileged to attend some of the best shows on offer! However, those closest have hinted that my reviews could be more succinct. “Whose got the time to read an essay?” So…
Wright and Grainger’s Orpheus, which won Best Theatre (Adelaide Fringe) in 2023, is quite simply a masterpiece. The duo’s unique style of gig theatre brings us their most recent iteration of Orpheus. Myth, woven into contemporary lore here, survives being replayed, retuned, interrogated, and reshaped.
Drawing on the pantheon of Ancient Greek deities, who, across their shows, often frequent a local caf from whence they magically and brilliantly interact with contemporary mortals, this extraordinary duo from Yorkshire in the UK have crafted a highly engaging, visceral story. I was utterly spellbound.
This magnificent iteration of the tragic tale of Orpheus & Eurydice, from Orpheus’s point of view staged in the grand Mortlock Library marks a significant development in both the work—which I was first privileged to attend in the intimate, rustic Barbara Hardy Gardens at Holden Street Theatres in 2019—and the style of presentation. I should mention here their production of Eurydice, also staged in this extraordinary venue, sees the other side of the story.
Last year, the iteration I attended at The Treasury 1860 saw runway staging free the movement of these energetic performers significantly. Orpheus is never static. The danger comes the moment he pauses and…but that, to the uninformed, is a spoiler!
This staging in the Mortlock Library augments the runway configuration with lighting that supports Wright and Grainger’s wonderful delivery, delivery that flows with great ease between chatty and commanding. Further, the duo is supported by a superb live string quartet who also serve as vocal chorus. These additions to an already lyrically compelling text propel Orpheus to new heights!
We meet Dave, a man who, like so many of us, has lost the wonder and colour of childhood, out with some over exuberant mates for his thirtieth. He meets Eurydice in a bar, and the story takes off on its joyous path—until Eurydice meets a Fate that takes her to Hades.
The gods have a habit of dropping in unannounced. Wright & Grainger simply let them order coffee first. And the story takes another wonderfully engaging turn.
Alex Wright is electric as the main storyteller, his dynamic rapid-fire delivery to match Grainger’s sometimes driving guitar exquisitely balanced by measured sensitivity and powerfully held moments of stillness and silence. Phil Grainger’s singing is simply sublime, his virtuosity as a bard unquestionable, his stage presence incredibly engaging.
In this, Grainger really is a bard in the old sense: one who understands that the song isn’t about being heard, it’s about what happens after the last note.
By the time Wright & Grainger’s Orpheus, reaches it’s inevitable yet refreshingly surprising conclusion the room is loaded up with a rich cocktail of heartbreak, humour and reverence, a deeply communal and cathartic experience. While it’s a story so old it could be devoid of relevance, this Orpheus explodes into a life that is compelling and immediate. If Fringe is about finding something that stays with you longer than expected, then this is one of those evenings you measure the rest of the festival against.
Word around is we won’t be seeing Wright & Grainger for a few years of Fringe, so needless to say, Go! See It!
John Doherty
When: 19 Feb to 22 Mar
Where: The Mortlock Library at The Courtyard of Curiosities
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. The Wandering Hall of Possibility. 14 Mar 2026
Audience enters The Wandering Hall of Possibility clutching issued Worker cards identifying their roles at Persephone Colony on the Moon in the year 3099. It is time stamped by a staffer. Seats are taken in a very lightly cool hall, suggestive of refrigerator temperature. Walls are steel grey. Locked hatch door with green computer screen is very much in evidence. Signs of nature are, initially, totally nonexistent. We are clearly not on Earth. The atmosphere is foreboding. The three colonists observing, managing audience/worker entry are stiff and stern.
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl has been transformed by playwright Ceridwen Dovey into something of a journey of the little match girl (Ren Williams), and her tragedy becomes a dual tale centred on two trees. One of artificial light, one of wood and bark, and two girls from two different worlds nonetheless united by history.
The little match girl’s life on Earth in its dying days, buried within tall buildings, mirrors 12 year old Gilda (Elizabeth Hay), leader of the Moon colony buried deep within Moon crust, who—despite a cultural pact all colonists share as they chant “we endure cold and ice, we make our piece with it”—wants change.
It is extraordinary witnessing and experiencing Andersen’s tale of a little girl desperate to sell matches (battery candles). desperate for warmth and hope unto death, transformed into a story of life, love and hope steeled by a harshness no audience can refuse existence of.
The last living tree of Earth is within the Moon colony. Grandmother Tree, Gilda calls her. Grandmother, thousands of years old is speaking to her. Telling stories of the Earth Moonkind have rejected. Telling them stories are a hope, a future, a connection not to be spurned. Gilda is accepting this.
The little match girl wants to get beyond the constrained artificial city, to see the rumoured sky of stars. Gilda wants to abandon rigid survival-based fear of the past, ancestry, obliteration. She yearns for the actual world, actual universe that world partakes in.
Their paths meet in strange, mystical, beautiful ways. They learn to imitate nature. Breathe in. Breath out.
Director Andy Packer superbly blends dualities of Dovey’s script into a whole, making the span of a millennium seem a mere year. Dovey’s transformation of Andersen’s cold death for a child becomes something powerful and life affirming, supported by a great tree’s resources itself, absolutely linked to yearning for life within the moon colony.
Packer and ensemble’s challenge is to transform longing into a kind of meaning without boundary or fearful limitation. This is achieved in performances of great, focused depth.
The ensemble of Ren Williams, Elizabeth Hay and Nathan O’Keefe bring the dark, desperate and hopeful worlds of Earth and Moon brilliantly into being. Most especial is Williams exposition of a little girl crossing a desert to a clasp of great trees. It’s so powerful you see it beyond the set its performed in.
The sheer poetry of the work is profoundly augmented by Quincy Grant’s score and Chris Petridis’s powerfully brutal and beautiful lighting in which the very hall comes to life as if natural, simultaneously supporting Thom Buchanan’s richly hued projection images illustrating Earth sending craft to the Moon, all housed by Ailsa Paterson’s austere yet magnificent set and costumes.
The Tree of Light is the concluding panel of the great triptych A Precise Compendium of Wonder. There are elements of the first two pieces in this third work, linking all completely.
This work has undoubtedly entered the Australian National canon.
David O’Brien
When: 18 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: The Wandering Hall of Possibility
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Hofesh Shechter Company. 13 Mar 2026
Dreams are the subconscious at play, food for artists of every creative medium there is. Food for humankinds yearnings, despairs and joys.
Choreographer and Composer Hofesh Shechter manages to meld mediums of theatre, dance, music and cinema offering a stunning production profoundly giving life to the psychological realm of dream worlds, which seem at once obvious to you intellectually after the fact, as the experience of the production is pondered.
Yet actual experience of the work in the moment, like all dreaming, is beyond comprehension in words as it grips your soul.
Does one ever understand a dream? The forces behind dreaming?
We would all say we feel them, yes? It’s a primal, emotive thing.
The primal and emotional are foremost in the first half of this 90-minute work.
It begins intriguingly as a suited dancer in the front row of Festival Theatre, while house lights are on, climbs onto the stage and disappears under the stage curtain.
Once the lights are down, Shechter unleashes on the audience a realisation of dreams and dreaming all too close to reality psychologically.
He does this by means of framing whiplash wild phrases of ensemble movement using two layers of moving curtains to shape the scope of what we see, in partnership with Tom Visser’s excellently aware lighting, spanning the technical requirements of both film and stage.
Visser and Shechter deliver a mise en scène alike to the modern mind’s eye of scene to scene dream experience, as lighting moves from deep near darkness to revelatory light. Most significant of all is the sudden drops to instant darkness, back to light, motion and darkness again, the very episodic nature of a dream.
Shechter’s score played live is a masterful expression of the inner self in its other worldly ways; ripping techno riffs and beats backed by wind instruments expressive of a place beyond reality, in which physical expression of psychological chaos and emotion is at its heights.
Then, like dreams do, tempo shifts.
We enter a dirty blues phrase musically. The band appear on stage dressed in red; Norman Jankowski, Barttomiej Janiak, and James Keane. Frenzy shifts down several notches ushering in a reasonable period of what seems like a red lighting swathed Twin Peaks feeling world and almost happy salsa dance like atmosphere.
Which does not last.
On the mad dream rolls. Even a waking moment, as house lights come up and the audience is itself encouraged to dance. Then, to sit, to ‘dream’ again.
That in itself is the power of this work. To take an audience deep into the inner depths of dreaming in the dark theatre of fantastical sights, sounds lights and feelings, awaken and submerge them again.
David O’Brien
When: 13 to 15 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
★★★★★
Deus Ex Femina. Goodwood Theatre and Studios. 11 Mar 2026
The Damage is Done makes a welcome return season for those who have missed it.
Words. They have a history in meaning. When it comes to damage, irrevocable destruction fits etymologically applied to the life of Isadora and sister Chris’s dual life secrets which tear their family apart.
Isadora (Katherine Sortini) is a highly intelligent fish-out-of-water personality. Wrapped up in a tight, very large, extremely eccentric Italian family in which she half fits in. It’s her mother’s 50th birthday celebration through which Isadora introduces the audience to herself and family and ensuing shock fall outs during that event.
Sortini creates a mother who’s an outwardly modern, fashion conscious (in a rather not so good Catholic way), Tik Tok using woman, who is simultaneously somehow a very traditional Italian Catholic woman. Her sister Chris is the favourite child, married to Marcus, a bobble head collecting nerd, not perfect, weird. But her parents are glad she is at least married.
Sortini’s writing portrays these characters in rich, delightfully, comically caustic language. This illuminates a cheeky, warm confidence in Isadora. Her family and extended families’ flaws are celebrated as much as looked askance at.
This contrasts with deeper, long-lasting inner identity worries within Isadora. Exposing to us the awkward kid adoring a school girlfriend in a way she doesn’t quite understand. Living a life her family know nothing of.
It is when the birthday celebration is interrupted by police arresting Chris’ husband Marcus, things go downhill. Pedophilia is the charge.
The Damage is Done in effect is two stories in which two siblings face different responses from their family and the greater world to irrevocable damage from being associated with an ‘evil’, but more sadly in Isadora’s case, being who she truly is. Gay.
No matter how dark the abyss Isadora and her sister fall into, the story remains grounded in comic expression.
Rejection. Disownment. Denial. Confusion. These come from all corners of life. It is in words, knowing their meaning that Isadora is able to partly find a way back.
Sortini’s performance is electric start to finish. With one chair, superb lighting and sound score, she imbues a production handling such deeply sensitive issues with insightful clarity an audience can consider with empathy as much as humour.
It is a confronting work. In a deeply human way. One in which judgement is superseded by lighted pathways of understanding.
David O’Brien
When: 11 to 15 Mar
Where: Goodwood Theatre and Studios
Bookings: Closed