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
Adelaide Festival. The Space. 13 Mar 2026
Whitefella Yella Tree is outstanding theatre and sharply focussed storytelling.
Written by Dylan Van Den Berg and presented by Griffin Theatre Company, this two-hander features Joseph Althouse as ‘Ty’ and Danny Howard as ‘Neddy’. The action follows the unfolding love story between two young Indigenous men navigating life in the early years of white colonisation of Australia.
Van Den Berg’s writing skilfully interweaves two thematic strands: the place of queerness within Indigenous culture, and the destructive impact of European colonisation. While these ideas might seem unrelated, the playwright uses each to illuminate the other with impressive clarity. Their relationship recalls M. C. Escher’s Drawing Hands: each theme gives shape and momentum to the other. Though the narrative is historical, the production frames it with a contemporary sensibility, including costuming that sees Ty and Neddy dressed in board shorts and T-shirts (one imprinted with the “Always was, always will be” slogan) quietly merging past and present.
The central relationship is compellingly drawn through contrast. Ty and Neddy come from different mobs. Ty is calm, sensitive, and a man of ideas; Neddy is restless and driven – he’s a man of impulsive action. Their differences drive the narrative. As the first flushes of Ty and Neddy’s romance gradually emerge, Althouse and Howard reveal themselves to be highly assured performers. Their work is restrained and truthful: nothing is overstated and nothing approaches salaciousness. The intimacy—carefully shaped with the guidance of intimacy coordinator Bayley Turner—is tender rather than provocative. Indeed, the fact that the relationship is between two men quickly becomes incidental, which is precisely the point. As Van Den Berg notes in his program notes, traditional Indigenous perspectives on queerness differ markedly from those imported through European colonisation. One simply exists without stigma; the other imposes it. (And who cares what people like Anthony Mundine think?) This reviewer pondered the similarities of how the writing treats the relationship between Ty and Neddy, compared to how David and Patrick’s love affair in the hugely popular comedic TV series Schitt’s Creek is addressed, where homosexuality is not an issue and almost doesn’t even need to be named.
The play’s emotional trajectory darkens when Neddy’s curiosity and sense of adventure draw him into contact with white colonists, and it changes him forever. Exposure to colonial attitudes, and especially about the immorality of homosexuality, dramatically changes how he views his relationship with Ty, and it almost destroys it. When they are reunited, Ty is supremely suspicious of what has happened to Neddy and he holds even more dearly onto his sense of self and history, as he perceives the looming physical and cultural danger of the whites.
The production’s excellent design elements clearly articulate this tension with precision. The sound design by Steve Toulmin, alongside the stunning lighting by Kelsey Lee and Kaite Sfetykidis, create an environment that is both beautiful and foreboding. The sparse staging evokes the Australian bush, while the lighting captures the shifting interplay of heat, shadow, and sunlight with striking effect.
Dominating the stage is an uprooted lemon tree—the “whitefella yella tree”—suspended above the stage. Citrus trees are not native to Australia, and the image resonates symbolically: the sour fruit and the looming spectre of the tree that could fall at any moment are a metaphor for the destructive forces of colonisation hanging over Ty and Neddy’s world.
This is a powerful production. Its message is unmistakable yet never moralising; its visual and sonic language is evocative; and the performances are authentic. Like the dreamtime, the storytelling passes in the blink of an eye, but its impact is long lasting.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 to 15 Mar
Where: The Space
Bookings: Closed
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Anna Thomas. Holden Street Theatres. 14 Mar 2026
She arrives in a fugue of guilt-laden chaos: out of breath, carrying too many bags.
She is Woman, 2026. Her life is on overload.
Anna Thomas deposits the bags in the four corners of the neatly swept Barbara Hardy Garden stage and, switching into graceful theatrical mode, offers a brief meditation on the physics—and metaphysics—of shadow. It gives pause for reflection.
But not for long. Thomas’s Fringe show roars into recognisable reality as a comparative study of women’s coping mechanisms. She presents four types, each in varying states of coping (or not). Motherhood and school routines are no child’s play. Keeping all the balls in the air against the clock—getting everything right, pleasing everyone—is daunting. To be the “perfect” woman requires an obscenely early start and a lot of self-sacrifice.
It isn’t funny. But Thomas makes it so.
She works the audience with ease and draws out surprising truths. It’s rather fun—until it isn’t. The laughter becomes an interlude as her four sample women push through their demanding days and familiar challenges: delivering baked goods to school, navigating incompetent male colleagues, and absorbing the daily grind of modern expectations.
Thomas, who performs with fine stage discipline and a lovely voice, then appears to commit the ultimate live-performance sin: she picks up a script and refers to it. For a moment, you can almost see stars dropping from the show’s rating. Then the penny drops. Of course she—and we—need points of reference in the race of modern life: cars, clothes, endless washing, shopping, cooking, accommodating the needs of others, work, deadlines…
It’s easy to send it up. It’s hard to live it.
And where, in the harried transience of it all, is the self of Woman?
This is a fast, furious, clever and highly entertaining slice of Fringe. Women: get thee hence, and feel the sweetness of sisterhood.
Samela Harris
When: 14 to 22 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au