Season Preview: Your guide to the arts in 2021

The Adelaide Festival has announced that Neil Armfield’s staging of Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be its headline production in 2021. Not only is the Joint Artistic Director’s 2009 production a tried and tested one, a predominantly Antipodean cast neatly gets around any COVID-19 related quarantine rules which may or may not be in place come next February.

“I am thrilled finally to bring this production to Australian audiences,” said Armfield. “It is an opera of beauty and of joy and it’s very much about reconciliation and magic. We think it’s the perfect work to cheer us up and to remind us of the beauty of the world, the beauty of the imagination and the beauty of making theatre.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2009. Photograph © Felix Sanchez

The opera, which will play four performances from next February and March, will star American countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen as Oberon, King of the Fairies. Nussbaum Cohen, who is also lined up to play Rosenkranz in Armfield’s production of Brett Dean’s Hamlet when it...