★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Yurt at the Migration Museum. 10 Mar 2026
The now established tradition of Wright and Grainger producing challenging, yet beautifully crafted iterations of gig theatre inspired by Ancient Greek mythology sees Selene, a work beautifully crafted by the duo in collaboration with Megan Drury. This wonderfully rich storytelling continues to blend myth with a deeply human experience. With the phenomenal success of Eurydice, Orpheus, The Gods! The Gods! The Gods! and Helios—previous explorations intertwining Ancient Greek mythology with contemporary life setting a high bar—Selene does not fail to deliver.
The original mythology sees Pandia, abbreviated (irritating for she who is named so) to Panda, as the personification of the full moon. Born of Zeus and the moon goddess Selene. Pandia translates to "all brightness" or "all-divine," representing light, beauty, and youth. She is associated with the Athenian festival of the same name. And herein lies the genius of the text. While the mythology presents Selene drawing the moon across the sky using a silver chariot, Wright & Grainger present Selene as a truck driver, frequently away from her daughter at night. When the show opens, Panda is 16 and the embodiment of potential marred by deep anger and resentment about the loss of her father many years earlier in an accident.
The original myth sees Selene deeply in love with the mortal, Endymion. Our Selene remains in love with her deceased beau. Where Zeus grants Selene’s wish that Endymion be granted immortality, Zeus places him into an eternal, ageless sleep. An ageless sleep in Wright & Grainger’s iteration indicated by a proliferation of photographs of Panda’s father around the little North Yorkshire cottage close to the Kilburn White Horse hillside carving.
Megan Drury’s storytelling sees her embody the journey from teen to young woman within the orbit of her mother, Selene, in a performance at once electric, warm and tender. Drury draws us into a world where the mythical becomes intimately personal.
We journey through Megan’s transitions between her angry confused teen years, her night club-based explorative late teens and early twenties and, finally, to a point in her mid -twenties where she comes to recognise her inherent value. It’s gorgeously evocative, crisp writing, every image placed with care, every moment delivered with sincerity. The final moments of this extraordinary narrative brought many audience members’ eyes to shine with tears of joy, a joy, I think, of recognition in themselves.
Grainger’s music provides an unobtrusive yet ever present foundation beneath the narrative, enhancing mood and emotion without ever overwhelming the story. Together Drury’s superbly delivered narrative and Grainger’s soundtrack, create an atmosphere that feels gently timeless, illuminated by simple and effective lighting, further enriching this extraordinarily vivid delivery.
Selene explores longing, resilience, identity, self-acceptance and the illumination one experiences with that. It feels both ancient and immediate, familiar and freshly imagined.
Drury moves effortlessly between mythic scale and human fragility, guiding the audience with precision and compassion. The intimacy of the space amplifies every shift in energy and emotion, making the experience profoundly engaging.
Selene is storytelling at its most affecting. Wright & Grainger once again demonstrate their remarkable ability to transform myth into something achingly real. A radiant and memorable work.
Go see it.
John Doherty
When: 19 Feb to 21 Mar
Where: The Yurt
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Sturm Theatre Company. 7 Mar 2026
Strip down August Strindberg’s Miss Julie into a one hour production as Little Miss Julie? Why not?
Strindberg is one of the out-there playwrights of his era who wrote about themes considered shocking. Little Miss Julie successfully manages the fraught themes of class, power, and sexuality very well.
Director/Writer James Harvy’s script is tight and to the point in adaptation. Language has been adjusted. It allows in that hour careful development of the contentious, even dangerous relationship between Coachman John (James Harvy), Cook Christine (Sarah Jeavons) and their Mistress, Miss Julie (Ruby Patrich).
Strindberg created Miss Julie as a contrary, imperious creature emboldened by her ruling class status. Her servants, however, have known her since she was a kid. Yet they are forever beneath her.
This complex dilemma is handled differently by John and Christine. John is constantly angered by her unseemly behaviour. Christine is content to let things be and comfortably adapts with acceptance to her station in life.
Yet John and Christine have known each other all their lives too. Christine rescuing John from homeless poverty to the position he now holds.
Little Miss Julie is a battle between three people who want different things from the world and each other. Some kind of freedom. They’re also not above breaking rules of moral, let alone rules of social status to get it. Yet they’ll deny the reality of their choices.
Miss Julie is a dangerous catalyst. Ruby Patrich plays her with exceptional poise and timing. Her Miss Julie is powerfully, supremely imposing.
Miss Julie is on a power trip, playing every moment carefully for full impact on her subjects. Happy to insult Christine. Happy to embarrass John when she commands him to dance with her in public. She gives, then takes away permission to step outside established boundaries.
So happy to stir up hidden feelings and enjoy the discomfiting outcome in her human playthings. Especially John. John clearly harbours something deep within regarding Miss Julie. Yet he harkens to his bond with Christine. But what is that bond? They seem attached like a couple, yet not. Brother, Sister like?
This cast brilliantly manage to play out games between characters without making intention obvious until it’s too late for each as they realise the dilemmas they are caught in.
The gap between John’s dream of freedom, Christine’s self comfort, and Miss Julie’s limitless power and who each of these desperate people really are is great.
It’s a roller coaster ride in which adrenalin fuelled highs come crashing down, stripping away masks and delusions in a breath-taking way.
David O’Brien
When: 6 to 15 Mar
Where: Star Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Toneelhuis / FC Bergman. 6 Mar 2026
Works and Days is the most darkly brutal, melancholic, yet awe inspiring expression of humanity’s devolution.
A production absorbed in darkness as the transition from rural agricultural society to the robotic present processes wordlessly as a series of scenes. Collaboration and effort are mired in dry, gritty, sometimes comedic, yet unfulfilling reality.
The tone of the work is set as the stage floor is torn up by a plough, by hand, as seed is spread through the furrows. There’s nothing joyous about it. Nothing natural, nothing fruitful or bountiful.
The peasant level harshness of this life is accentuated. Not the the mythical joy. Yet it is hinted at in the comic moment of love-making by two peasants and seemingly playful Maypole moment, which is anything but.
Even the produce of the ‘earth’ offered as red, green and yellow oblongs of wood, are not heartening.
What does hint, yearn even, of the mythology of joy behind human progress, and darkness (whatever that is) is the score, performed live by Joachim Badenhorst and Sean Carpio.
Flute, harpsichord, and bass saxophone are deployed to create a deeply emotive, genuinely soul-like spirit beneath the mechanical, sometimes barbaric moments of each phase of social/industrial development. There’s a real battle to engage, as the music’s powerful impact of spirit and myth, does not reconcile with the harsh vision before us.
Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten, and Marie Vinck’s direction, scenario, and scenography, is faultless in transition of phrasing. We are in no doubt of where we are in time, no doubt of intention but always left with questions. This outcome is powerfully supported by Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, and Ken Hioco’s lighting design. It is very delicate and subtle with an extremely keen eye on ensuring even bright colour maintains a focus on the darker side of this journey of supposed progress.
We are left with a very real conundrum to consider. What has humanity spent thousands of years doing during its days and all its works? Fighting against nature? Now fighting against its own technology?
David O’Brien
When: 6 to 8 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
★★★1/2
Fringe Festival. The Garage International. 7 Mar 2026
The Last Audition is a gentle, quietly melancholic drama for one actor laced with pathos, love and longing. At its centre is an ageing actor, played with much authenticity by Paul Shearman, who has passed the zenith of an illustrious career yet remains only dimly aware that his finest years are behind him.
The action follows him as he arrives for an audition and waits his turn. In the unforgiving space of the waiting room, he reflects on past triumphs as a celebrated Shakespearean performer, while fielding frequent telephone calls from a concerned daughter checking in on him. Gradually it becomes clear that those former glories have slipped away—along with his once formidable ability to remember text.
Although the protagonist is an actor, the play reaches beyond the theatre world. At heart it is a reflection on cognitive decline and dementia that, sadly, can accompany ageing. Shearman approaches the role with sincerity, investing the fading performer with a touching mixture of dignity, vulnerability and quiet suffering. As the character begins to recognise what is happening to him, flashes of frustration and anger surface. Yet even in these moments he quickly regains composure, retreating into the civilised refuge of language. After all, he is a man of letters for whom a well-chosen fragment of Shakespeare can still tame the chaos within and without.
For all its emotional potential, however, the drama does not always land with the force it might. The script occasionally lingers too long on reflective passages, and tighter dialogue would sharpen the emotional trajectory of the piece. The tension between moments of lucidity and episodes of confused reminiscence is moving and could be made more affecting through stronger vocal contrasts and more expressive physicality.
The intimate configuration of the Garage International space should ideally amplify the character’s isolation. Yet the production’s technical elements do not fully support this atmosphere. More sensitive lighting and sound amplification could deepen the sense of loneliness and internal disorientation that lies at the heart of the story.
Even so, The Last Audition remains a thoughtful and gently affecting play that touches on an issue of growing relevance in an ageing society. With sharper dialogue and more empathetic technical support, it could become a far more powerful piece of theatre.
Kym Clayton
When: 19 Feb to 22 Mar
Where: The Garage International
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Festival Theatre. 6 Mar 2026
Mary Said What She Said is not easy theatre. It places titanic demands on its solitary performer and tests the patience and stamina of its audience in equal measure. When the curtain falls, this reviewer is left holding two competing impressions: the production is exquisitely crafted—visually and aurally striking, and executed with undeniable theatrical skill—yet it often drifts into territory that feels self-indulgent.
The work unfolds as a 90-minute monologue depicting the final hours of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth I has already signed her death warrant for conspiring against her, and Mary waits alone in her cell at Fotheringhay Castle on the eve of her execution. No one could possibly truly grasp the emotional magnitude of such a moment, but Mary Said What She Said attempts, with daunting theatrical ambition, to imagine what might have passed through Mary’s mind as the end approached. In doing so, it becomes a reflection on memory, guilt, power and self-justification.
The text is by American novelist Darryl Pinckney, set to a compelling score by the fêted Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi, and originally directed by the iconic American director and playwright (especially of experimental theatre) Robert Wilson. Mary appears alone on stage, revisiting the many letters she wrote to friends, supporters and confidants—letters that ultimately formed the evidence used to convict her of plotting against Elizabeth. History has long debated the extent of Mary’s complicity in the conspiracy, but most historians accept that she was at least aware of, and tacitly supported, plans to remove Elizabeth to achieve both her freedom and the English throne.
The role is performed by the French stage and screen actor Isabelle Huppert, who delivers the entire monologue in French—the language of Mary’s court. English surtitles are projected above and to the sides of the vast stage. At times the spoken text is delivered at near breakneck speed, and the surtitles flash by faster than they can be read. The result is annoying: the audience must choose between reading the text and watching Huppert – it is difficult and at times impossible to do both. Yet after a while one surrenders and skims the surtitles as one becomes swept along by the emotional current of Mary’s reflections. In these moments, the character seems almost to be arguing her own innocence, persuading herself that the injustices she endured—particularly the long years of confinement in England—somehow justify the desperate plotting that sealed her fate.
Huppert’s performance is commanding. She presents Mary as both fiercely regal and at times submissive and subordinate. This dichotomy is reflected in her physicality: she moves across the stage like a marionette, her body twisting and contorting as though manipulated by invisible strings. At one moment she is engulfed in green light, silently screaming in fury at her predicament; at another she stands in stark white light that heightens both her royal authority and the possibility—however tenuous—of innocence. The role demands immense stamina, and Huppert never falters. Her voice remains clear, controlled and unwavering throughout. Her movement around the stage is choreographed superbly, and she effortlessly synchronises gesture with changes in lighting and sound. It never feels studied.
Lighting is central to the production, almost assuming the role of a character in its own right. The cavernous stage of the Festival Theatre is naked: there are no stage props; there is only Huppert, and light, forcing the audience to focus entirely on the actor and her words. She is frequently silhouetted against an immense backdrop that fills the entire upstage wall. Subtle and gradual shifts in hue and intensity create an atmosphere of looming dread. At one point she stands behind an invisible scrim that traps a growing cloud of white fog around her. Shards of light pierce the mist, conjuring a supernatural atmosphere. The image is unsettling, not least because it underlines an earlier sonic shock: three sudden, brutal blows representing the strokes required to sever Mary’s head.
Einaudi’s score is as expansive as it is relentless. It drives the drama forward, offering little relief apart from occasional changes of tempo and meter. Melody is sparse, but this austerity seems deliberate and is appropriate; the narrative leaves little room for lyrical distraction.
And yet, despite all its formidable artistry, the production never entirely satisfies, at least for this reviewer. It demands more concentration, more patience, perhaps even more acceptance from its audience than many are prepared to give. At times the experience feels overwhelming, as though the whole thing has been constantly wedged in overdrive.
Still, when the curtain falls at the end, there is no denying that something remarkable has taken place. Whatever its excesses may be, Mary Said What She Said is bold and uncompromising, and Huppert’s performance is a feat of endurance, control and an object lesson in stagecraft. Large sections of the audience rose to their feet in enthusiastic applause acknowledging this is theatre of striking ambition.
Kym Clayton
When: 6 to 8 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed