Glyndebourne hit leads Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy’s inaugural programme – but don’t expect blood and dildos.

The Adelaide Festival has announced that Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed production of Handel’s Saul will be its headline show for 2017. The visually dazzling, emotionally thrilling staging had international critics falling over themselves for superlatives when it opened as part of Glyndebourne Opera’s summer season last year. “The production is a triumph. Nearly every aspect of Kosky’s creative vision grabs audience attention,” wrote Howard Shepherdson reviewing for Limelight. “The stage pictures are as lush as the baroque music that accompanies them providing the audience with a visual and aural feast.”

Booking a known success story so hot off the press is something of a rarity on the festival circuit, so Artistic Directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy deserve credit for defying logistics to bag this triumph for the centrepiece of their inaugural festival. The latest instalment in a creative partnership that goes back to either Cloudstreet or The Seagull at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre in 1997 (they banter about whose memory is more acute on that point), the pair enjoyed what Armfield describes as...