Brett Sheehy had to hit the ground sprinting when returning to the helm of the Adelaide Festival, with the 2025 program sent to the printers less than two months after he started as artistic director.

Sheehy, who was AD of the event from 2005-08, was brought back to finalise and oversee the delivery of next year’s Festival after his predecessor Ruth Mackenzie left in early August to take up a new role within the Department of the Premier and Cabinet.

Brett Sheehy. Photo: Lachlan Woods

While the programming team had been working on some elements and several shows were already confirmed, including the previously announced centrepiece opera Innocence and the Tanztheater Wuppertal dance triptych Club Amour, the new artistic director sourced a lot of work at short notice with help from a network of friends and contacts amassed during a long career in what he dubs “festival land”.

Sheehy says the result includes “extraordinary opera, dance, theatre and music works” that audiences won’t be able to experience anywhere else in the country.

“The Festival program will carry that badge: Australia’s International Festival… I want us to claim that space and own it really proudly.”

Innocence, which will open the 17-day Festival on February 28, certainly fits that brief. The opera sees the intertwined stories of a wedding and a shooting at an international school in Helsinki unfold via a multi-level rotating set. It features a score by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, is directed by Australian Simon Stone, and premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in France, where the AF’s 2015-22 artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy saw it and were so moved they asked the board to secure it for 2025.

“I love that it’s contemporary… to come into the Festival as a director at short notice and to be handed this is a gift,” Sheehy says of the opera, which will feature New Zealand-born baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes alongside a cast of international stars.

One of the highlights of the Festival’s theatre line-up is Samuel Beckett’s solo play Krapp’s Last Tape, starring Oscar-nominated Irish actor Stephen Rea, who had his breakthrough in the 1992 film The Crying Game. Described by Sheehy as “short, sharp” Beckett because of its 55-minute runtime, the one-act play sees 69-year-old Krapp reflecting on his life’s journey by listening to the tapes he has recorded of himself every year.

In a nifty twist, the play by Dublin-based Landmark Productions features recordings of the early tapes that Rea made himself 12 years ago in case he might one day get to play the character.

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“It’s Beckett’s text, but it’s actually his [Rea’s] voice and you can hear the youth, the enthusiasm and the optimism,” Sheehy says.

Stephen Rea will perform in Krapp’s Last Tape. Photo: Pato Cassinoni

Highly anticipated by many fans of Australian journalist and author Trent Dalton will be the live stage show based on his book Love Stories, which premiered to glowing reviews during this year’s Brisbane Festival. Dalton’s book shares stories told to him by passersby as he sat on a street corner in Brisbane’s CBD with a 1960s Olivetti typewriter. The stage adaptation by Tim McGarry (who also adapted Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe for the Netflix series) brings these narratives to life with live performance, projections and even elements of dance, intertwining them with the love story of the author and his wife Fiona Franzmann.

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Sheehy says there is a strong theme of love running throughout the 2025 program, even if not all the examples are so obvious.

Club Amour – by celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch’s German dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal – brings together three works dedicated to love, desire and relationships, while Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter is a tribute to her late friends Shane McGowan (of The Pogues) and Sinéad O’Connor featuring songs by musicians including Nick Cave, Radiohead, David Bowie and Tom Waits.

Actor and director Rhoda Roberts will present My Cousin Frank, a tribute to her cousin Francis Roberts, a boxer who became Australia’s first Indigenous Olympian in 1964, while the music-theatre work Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the absent is actor, dancer and author Dorcy Rugamba’s love letter to the members of his family killed during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. To be presented at Elder Hall, Hewa Rwanda will see Rugamba speak about his family and what he learned from them, with accompaniment from Senegalese multi-instrumentalist and singer Majnun.

“It’s an incredible exploration of grief, of coping with grief, of the absurdity of war,” Sheehy says.

While the Festival’s box office result this year was significantly down on that of last year and the organisation posted a deficit for 2023-24, chief executive Kath M Mainland told InReview the program for 2025 comprises a similar number of events.

“The 2025 program budget was less than in 2024 – partly due to the lower box office result and deficit incurred, but also as a result of less overall funding (such as the Major Events funding we received for Little Amal), which gave us slightly more than usual to work with for the 2024 program,” she says.

“Regardless, we are confident audiences will enjoy what Brett and our team have assembled for 2025. It’s a healthy mix of international and Australian acts, a similar number of events (65 in 2025 compared to 64 in 2024), a focus on accessible pricing and the return of our homegrown festival club in The Courtyard.”

Seann Miley Moore will play Hedwig. Photo: Ryan Cara

Two musicals will bring a touch of rock ’n’ roll to the Festival program, with the first – Big Name, No Blankets – promising a feel-good adventure melding storytelling and music to trace the journey of Aboriginal rock group Warumpi Band, who formed in the Northern Territory in 1980 and were known for songs such as “Blackfella/Whitefella” and “My Island Home”.

A new Australian production of the late ’90s rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch will star singer Seann Miley Moore, who played the Engineer in Opera Australia’s Miss Saigon, as the anti-heroine Hedwig, whom the show’s producers describe as “dangerous, seductive, sassy and outrageously funny” – or, even better, “rebellion wrapped in fishnets and fury”. Hedwig will play in the historic Queens Theatre, with a live band and costumes by queer fashion icons Nicol & Ford.

“It’s incredibly pertinent today in terms of gender politics and so on, but also the score is just incredible,” Sheehy says.

Opening weekend will offer a sight to behold in Elder Park as more than 1000 dancers converge for the world premiere of Mass Movement, by Stephanie Lake Company, which wowed audiences at the 2022 Adelaide Festival with its explosive dance and drumming show Manifesto. Mass Movement is co-commissioned with the Australian Ballet and described as a “happening” ­– you could think of it as a super-sophisticated flash mob – that takes place over 30 minutes at dusk on March 1, beginning with a lone dancer and then building with a diverse mix of choreographed dance styles performed by professional and volunteer dancers aged 12 to 88.

Another must-see for dance lovers is boundary-pushing Spanish flamenco artist Rocío Molina, who will make her Australian debut in Caída del Cielo (Fallen from Heaven), a theatrical show that celebrates womanhood and sees Molina explore different versions of the “feminine archetype” while accompanied by live music including an electric guitar and drums.

Spanish flamenco artist Rocío Molina. Photo: Simone Fratini

Adelaide’s own Australian Dance Theatre will celebrate its 60th anniversary year with the previously announced Festival show A Quiet Language, choreographed by artistic director Daniel Riley, who says it “takes inspiration from the founding spirit of the company, and the fearlessness of our founding artistic director Elizabeth Cameron Dalman”.

UKARIA Cultural Centre’s annual Chamber Landscapes music program will be curated in 2025 by David Harrington, founder and artistic director of Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary in a show at last year’s Adelaide Festival. For the series, titled Horizons, Harrington has programmed artists from countries including Indonesia, Vietnam, Mali and Ireland, alongside the Australian String Quartet.

An ensemble of musicians from Horizons will play in a one-off concert – Dialogues in Sound – at the Adelaide Town Hall. Sheehy has also made the most of the international artists who are in town for Innocence, with Canadian soprano Claire de Sévigné and Finnish mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt both performing recitals at the lunchtime series Daylight Express in Elder Hall.

Other music highlights include Sarajevo-born Goran Bregović and his Wedding & Funeral Band (also playing at WOMADelaide), who will bring their high-energy fusion of Balkan folk, rock, and classical music to Her Majesty’s Theatre, and nyilamum – song cycles, which will see the Australian String Quartet perform woks by Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung woman Dr Lou Bennett and Australian composer Paul Stanhope that reflect on “land, identity, and resilience”.

One of the quirkiest shows coming to Adelaide is UK company Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare, which will present the works of the Bard in a way audiences have never seen before. Over eight days, performers will create condensed versions of all 36 of Shakespeare’s plays in miniature on a one-metre tabletop using everyday objects.

“All of the plays have been edited down to the purest storytelling narrative,” Sheehy says. “The conceit is incredibly funny, incredibly playful… each of the characters is a household object. So Lady Macbeth may be a bottle of tomato sauce, Richard III may be a salt shaker, and so on.”

New Festival club The Courtyard, to be located on the Festival Plaza, will have capacity for up to 600 people, with free entry and food, bars and live entertainment each evening from Wednesday to Sunday. Sheehy, whose previous Festivals included the popular Persian Garden festival club on the River Torrens, says The Courtyard will remain in the same spot for at least the next three festivals.

“The mission is that it be really visible. It will be light-based so it can be seen from anywhere around the precinct and Adelaide will know, that’s where our Festival club is.”

Adelaide Writers’ Week will return from March 1-6, and although the full line-up and schedule won’t be announced until January, the AF program reveals that guest authors will include Helen Garner, Geraldine Brooks, Tim Winton, Marcus Zusak, Jessie Tu, John Safran, Michael Robotham, Anthony Horowitz and Emily Maguire. It will also incorporate more than the usual number of ticketed events, among them discussions at the Town Hall on Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism, and a literary trivia evening hosted by TV presenter Shaun Micallef.

Noting that the literary event will take place in the aftermath of the US and UK elections and in the lead-up to a forthcoming Australian election, director Louise Adler says the attention of writers “will necessarily turn to the role of language in a political landscape which appears, paradoxically, to be characterised by deepening divisions and at the same time consensus among a political class committed to the status quo”.

“Adelaide Writers’ Week has long been able to host civil and generous conversations that inform, engage and inspire our audience and in these turbulent times, will continue that tradition.”

The Adelaide Festival also incorporates WOMADelaide, which has already made its first line-up announcement, the Art Gallery of SA’s Radical Textiles show, and exhibitions at Carrick Hill, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental and Samstag Museum of Art.

The 2025 Adelaide Festival will run from February 28 until March 16.