In Adelaide for the opening of this year’s Adelaide Festival, I could only stay for two days but thanks to some clever, thoughtful programming from co-Artistic Directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy and their team, I was able to see five very different shows, which together made for an exhilarating start.

Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet (read the Limelight review) was a real festival event and an intense and intensely rewarding way to launch the 2018 program. The following day Memorial, Thyestes, Split and The Far Side of the Moon each in their own, very different ways, offered something special.

★★★★☆ Memorial (Brink Productions)

Memorial is a deeply moving piece of theatre with a sublime score. It is based on Alice Oswald’s 2011 poem, which is “an excavation” (as she puts it) of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, set during the Trojan War. Oswald’s pared-back version honours the 215 warriors who die in it, naming them all. Chris Drummond, Artistic Director of Brink Productions, and Yaron Lifschitz, Artistic Director of Circa, worked together to adapt it for the stage, with Drummond directing the production and Lifschitz overseeing the movement.

Helen Morse in Memorial. Photo...