Canadian director Robert Lepage returns to the Adelaide Festival with a visually sumptuous staging of multiple works by Igor Stravinsky. The composer’s early opera tells the tale of The Emperor and the Nightingale, familiar from Hans Christian Andersen. Lepage complements it with a series of Stravinsky miniatures, including Renard (The Fox), a burlesque about a complacent rooster and the sly fox who’s out to get his harem of hens; Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont; Pribaoutki (four nonsense Russian rhymes for voice); and Berceuses du chat. The production features Taiwanese hand puppets, shadow play and, for The Nightingale, Vietnamese water puppetry. An international cast includes Aussies Jud Arthur, Robert Macfarlane, Pelham Andrews and Andrew Goodwin.

Limelight Editor’s Choice

Returning to Adelaide Festival for the first time since 2018, the internationally acclaimed Canadian auteur brings his brilliant imagination and a lush aesthetic to Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and Other Fables.

The Nightingale, Stravinsky’s first opera, was written between 1908-13 during the composer’s Russian period, at the same time as he was working on some of his greatest masterpieces, such as The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. Inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, this captivating work is blended with Russian fables and musical influences from Asia, Europe and early jazz from America.