There’s a radical spirit which spans the centuries in this year’s Adelaide Festival opera programme. On the one hand, Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale And Other Fables is reinvigorated in a new production by Canadian auteur Robert Lepage. On the other, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is brought to vigorous new life by former Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky.

Just as Stravinsky, Weill and Brecht broke moulds and pushed boundaries in their respective eras, Lepage and Kosky have produced a succession of major works that apply their own contemporary visions to productions drawn from the classical canon.

Lepage’s take on The Nightingale is an international co-production between his own Ex Machina company with Opéra National de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera. In tune with this internationalist approach, Lepage is working with Argentinean conductor Alejo Pérez, American puppet designer Michael Curry, and Canadian set designer Carl Fillion. A cast of 17 international singers, puppeteers and acrobats will join Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and State Opera South Australia for the show. 

Meanwhile, Kosky’s German production sees him working with the Berliner Ensemble, the company co-founded by Brecht in 1949 with actor Helene Weigel in then East Berlin. The company eventually took up residence in Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, where The Threepenny Opera (his and Weill’s own reworking of John Gay’s 19th-century romp, The Beggar’s Opera) premiered in 1928. 

For incoming festival artistic director Ruth Mackenzie, both productions are key markers of her first programme. That both productions cut through the sacred cow status of the original works to reinvigorate them, while remaining true to their source, was part of the appeal.

‘It was difficult for us to know whether to call Barrie’s production an opera or a theatre piece,’ Mackenzie says of the festival’s attempt to define the indefinable, ‘but the truth is, in Barrie’s hands, it is both, as well as being an anti-opera, which is what Brecht and Weill believed. It’s technically brilliant (Barrie always is), theatrically and musically brilliant; sexy, funny, political.’

As for The Nightingale, in Mackenzie’s view it is ‘one of Robert Lepage’s best productions, ever. He’s done a marvellous job... this is the ideal opera for anyone who doesn’t normally think that opera is for them. It is a joyous, delightful, magical, theatrical and musical experience. Of course, for those who do love opera, it’s Igor Stravinsky’s first, and it’s rarely performed. You won’t see a better production in your life.’

The Nightingale And Other Fables, Adelaide Festival Centre, Friday 1, Sunday 3, Tuesday 5 & Wednesday 6 March, times vary; The Threepenny Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre, Wednesday 6– Sunday 10 March, times vary.