Adelaide Festival has announced one of its major productions for the 2024 program: Canadian auteur Robert Lepage’s The Nightingale and Other Fables.

Lepage will arrive in Australia to oversee rehearsals in late February for the production first seen in Toronto in 2010 and widely praised since for its bold reimagining of Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale, which is told through episodes of Vietnamese water puppetry and traditional Japanese puppet theatre.

The production has become famous for turning the conventional operatic experience on its head, placing the orchestra on stage while singers perform and manipulate puppets in an orchestra pit flooded with water.

The Nightingale and Other Fables. Photo © Michael Cooper

Speaking from Canada, Lepage said: “I am thrilled to be coming back to the Adelaide Festival with an opera production that means so much to me. It is a true joy to deconstruct a work and explore the boundless potential of opera. The Nightingale and Other Fables weaves together the crafts of singing, music, puppetry, dance, acting, mime, architecture, and literature – it has it all...