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
