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Adelaide Festival

events|adelaide%20festival|2010-02-26-2010-03-14

This season, the director predicts wonderful trouble.

Editorial

When: 2 - 18 March, 2012
Where: Various venues across Adelaide
Tickets: Bookings through BASS, 131 246

Paul Grabowsky appears set to dislodge a charming cat among local pigeons in 2012. In his concluding year as Artistic Director, the artist and curator seems to be having nothing but fun.

One wonders if a portion of that fun found its origins on the bedroom walls of a teenage Grabowsky. Two of the French pin-ups of our Arts past pop up in the program. Jane Birkin, muse to Serge Gainsbourg and Hermès, plays the Opening Night concert. Implausibly gifted screen actress Isabelle Huppert plays Blanche Dubois in a Polish reimagining of A Streetcar Named Desire.

As the Festival shifts from a biennial to a yearly shindig, the temperature of talent heats up. And how. The film composer Ennio Morricone has earned the Honorific “Maestro” and he will lead Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in a monumental outdoor performance.

Bangarra Dance Theatre, led by former Festival honcho Stephen Page will feature as will a Pinter play. Yes: you read right. A play by Harold Pinter. Performed in English. Without performers wrapped in cellophane and digital light shows, to the best of our knowledge. Jonathan Pryce in The Caretaker? Don’t mind if I do.

Imagination, erudite personal obsession and the shocking desire to actually please large numbers of people seem to inform this extraordinary fortnight.

Helen Razer, Citysearch