Adelaide Festival nearly imploded in its lead-up. So, how did things play out?

Despite a chaotic lead-up to this year’s Adelaide Festival – in which Writers’ Week was cancelled, most of the festival board resigned, and a shadow of uncertainty was cast over the event – the city is heaving with people, the sun is shining and there is an air of expectation.

Britpop veterans Pulp performed to a rapturous crowd on opening night, and halfway through the 17-day festival, ticket sales are “tracking the same as in previous years”, according to its PR. Parallel to the main program (February 28 to March 5) is guerilla event Constellations: Not Writers’ Week.

Matthew Lutton made his debut as director of the internationally acclaimed event in its 41st year, and he could not be happier. His ambitious vision is to create more large international co-productions. If there is an amazing singer in Iceland you want to write music, or a choreographer in Japan you’re keen to work with, Lutton wants to make that happen.

“Adelaide Festival [is] an international festival, and part of that is [developing] international relationships,” he says. “I really want to try and be a platform or springboard for those sorts of amazing collaborations.”

Sadly, local artists are encouraged to think smaller and smaller, Lutton says. That’s part of why we have seen the proliferation of one-woman shows such as Prima Facie and, under Lutton’s earlier tenure at Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre, Wake in Fright. While they are fantastic, there is a significant economy involved.

“It’s upsetting that you hear artists always thinking, ‘How can I make it smaller?’” Lutton says. “Let’s think the opposite: what’s the really big idea?”

His large-scale thinking is already on clear display. Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, directed by renowned theatre-maker Romeo Castellucci, was announced last week as part of the 2027 festival, making it the second big Australian opera premiere, alongside AIDA, Franco Zeffirelli’s grand spectacular direct from Verona.

This year’s festival includes eight world premieres and 12 Australian premieres. Simon Stone’s reimagining of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is set in contemporary South Korea and stars Cannes best actress award winner Doyeon Jeon and Squid Game’s Haesoo Park.

Another highlight is Édouard Louis’ History of Violence as interpreted by acclaimed director Thomas Ostermeier, an extraordinary piece performed in German with subtitles, incorporating actors self-filming to the big screen in real-time video and live music on stage.

This weekend, Isabelle Huppert stars in one of Robert Wilson’s final masterpieces, Mary Said What She Said, in which she plays Mary Queen of Scots.

Two other major international works, Gatz – an eight-hour durational piece that Lutton describes as a binge of The Great Gatsby set in an office block – and Theatre of Dreams, by in-demand choreographer Hofesh Shechter, will be staged over the final weekend.

“Artists are very interested in going into uncomfortable places and talking about what’s happening in the world; they do it in entertaining, thrilling ways,” Lutton says.

The idea of uncomfortable places segues neatly to the drama that engulfed the festival in January, when Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah was spectacularly uninvited from Writers’ Week by the then Adelaide Festival board, which led to about 200 authors boycotting, artistic director Louise Adler stepping down and, ultimately, the entire event being cancelled.

At last Friday’s much-anticipated opening night gig – which itself nearly didn’t happen – Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker made a pointed comment: “All voices should be heard, and it’s better when they are.”

Towards the end of the anthemic Common People, which he says was inspired by a conversation with someone he disagreed with, he added: “So all voices are important. And all voices should be heard. Never forget.”

Many in the crowd knew he was referring to the Sydney-based author and academic who has been strident in her criticism of Israel and Zionism. In the aftermath, all bar one person on that board resigned, a new chair and board was subsequently appointed and a rebel event, Constellations, sprang up.

With 50 events across nine days, total attendance numbers are not available, but organisers say they raised enough to pay more than 110 writers at Australian Society of Authors rates.

Attended by a full house of 1100, its headline event featured Adler in conversation with Abdel-Fattah at Adelaide Town Hall on Sunday night. It sold out in three days and had hundreds on the waiting list. Journalist Peter Greste, introducing the event, said: “Freedom of speech is not abstract – it lives and dies in places like this.”

‘All voices are important. And all voices should be heard. Never forget.’

Jarvis Cocker, musician

Adler started by “setting the record straight” about Adelaide Writers’ Week. “Not programming someone who believes they should be invited is not an act of censorship,” she said.

“What constitutes literary merit is, of course, a contentious question, but thankfully, navigating these complexities is not a task we assign to premiers or, worse, to ... dyspeptic memoirists.”

The exclusion of Abdel-Fattah from AWW was certainly racist, Adler continued. “But the hysteria generated by her mere inclusion in a writers festival reveals what is really at stake: that is, the unbearable truth of the destruction of Gaza and Gazan lives must be repressed at all costs.”

Adelaide Festival was contacted but declined to comment.

In a compelling discussion, Abdel-Fattah said: “We have unfinished business here as a settler colony”, and that “Palestinians are not considered human”. She argued that Zionism was an ideology and, like all ideologies, it should be subjected to a critique.

Her novel Discipline, winner of the People’s Choice award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award last month, examines the lives of a Palestinian journalist and a Palestinian academic living in Australia and navigating their way in the world.

Several authors who had been slated to appear at Adelaide Writers’ Week were part of Constellations, including a thought-provoking panel featuring professor Clare Wright, Bob Brown, Hannah Ferguson and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

It included a poetry stream featuring Nobel Prize in Literature winner J.M. Coetzee, organised by Mike Ladd, that focused on poets who have been oppressed and silenced.

Ladd read Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann read First Nations American poet Joy Harjo, while Coetzee read Osip Mandelstam, a Russian Jew who disappeared into Stalin’s gulags.

Rivers of Reason: Blak & Arab Writers in Conversation explored the solidarity between First Nations and Palestinian people, featuring Micaela Sahhar, whose Find Me at the Jaffa Gate won the award for non-fiction at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and Daniel Nour (How to Dodge Flying Sandals), interviewed by Courtney Jaye.

In a later session, Dominic Guerrera spoke with Professor Irene Watson – of the Tanganekald, Meintangk, Bunganditj and Potaruwutj First Nations Peoples, of the south-east of South Australia – and Chelsea Watego, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman. “We are still considered non-human,” said Watson, to which Watego replied “Maybe settlers could learn how to be human from blackfellas.”

Judy Potter chairs the new Adelaide Festival board; she previously held that role for eight years. The warmth of the welcome back has been terrific, she says, as has the teamwork involved in making the festival happen in just five weeks.

New deputy chair Rob Brookman was previously Adelaide Festival’s artistic director, and has remained involved in a range of roles. “The day after we were appointed, decisions were made to send the apology to Dr Abdel-Fattah, to send an invitation to her for the following Writers’ Week, and to undertake a number of acts of restitution,” he says.

“It’s been suggested by some of the media that these were acts of grovelling, acts designed purely in order to keep Jarvis Cocker and Pulp intact for the opening night.

“As far as we were concerned, the actions that we took were all completely the right actions to take and utterly sincere in the way in which we spoke about it. Is it also true that it probably stopped who knows how much of the rest of the program falling apart? Yes, it is. I think it could easily have turned into a further stampede for the door.”

As for any pushback about inviting Abdel Fattah next year, Brookman says it’s come “only from the people who cheered when she was disinvited”.

“One of the things that’s often forgotten in the commentary is that she’s been to Writers’ Week to talk before – she was there in 2023 – and nothing terrible happened.”

Kerrie O’Brien travelled as a guest of the Adelaide Festival.

Adelaide Festival runs until March 15, 2026.

Read more about the Adelaide Festival:

• Adelaide Festival pulls Palestinian-Australian writer from Writers’ Week program
• Star British author Zadie Smith joins dozens of authors boycotting Adelaide Writers’ Week
• Board members quit Adelaide Festival as dumped writer calls in lawyer
• Chair quits Adelaide Festival board as writers’ week crisis continues
• Adelaide Writers’ Week cancelled after director quits
• ‘Vicious assault’: Ousted writer threatens defamation action against South Australian premier
• Why Britpop legends Pulp U-turned on Adelaide Festival boycott
• Louise Adler and Randa Abdel-Fattah headline rebel Adelaide literary festival

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