Flinders Drama Centre's end-of-year season opens this week with Wrestling with Tomorrow, a collection of original short works created and performed by the 2026 graduating Honours ensemble. Presented at Adelaide Festival Centre from November 11 to 13, it begins a month-long program of performances that explore what theatre can do in a changing world and where it might go next.
Across the season, students originate or select work that experiments with language and form while confronting urgent social, political and environmental questions. From the Honours ensemble's original works to Alice Birch's daring and explosive Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. and the world premiere of Howard Barker's Prefix, the program reflects the issues students care about, holds competing ideas open and reveals the expansive theatrical imaginations emerging at the Drama Centre.
The final week brings the world premiere of Prefix together with the return to Adelaide of internationally acclaimed director and Flinders Drama Centre alumnus Benedict Andrews. Directors involved in the season will join other emerging theatre makers in a masterclass led by Andrews before he delivers the 2026 Wal Cherry Lecture at Adelaide Festival Centre's Space Theatre.
The program forms Flinders Drama Centre's contribution to the 2026 Flinders Festival of Creative Arts, which opened last week and brings together student work across performance, writing, screen, visual effects and entertainment design.
Wrestling with Tomorrow grows from the ideas, experiences and preoccupations of the graduating Honours artists. Personal, political, comic and unexpected, the works capture emerging artists imagining what comes next and defining the voices they will carry into the profession. Directed by Anthony Nicola and created with students from Flinders' Master of Virtual Production, the production brings live performance and screen practice together.
Later in November, Third Year students present Alice Birch's Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Funny, unsettling and deliberately unruly, the play breaks apart familiar exchanges to expose the assumptions and power relationships within everyday speech. The production is directed by graduating Honours directing student Kiara Skene.
The Third-Year season concludes with the world premiere of Howard Barker's Prefix, bringing Acting, Directing and Theatre-Making students together in a major new production. Following the Honours cohort's investigation of Barker's work in July, the Third-Year ensemble encounters his newest writing: a provocative and darkly comic play in which desire, freedom and the abundance of choice collide.
First- and Second-Year students respond to the season's themes through Dawn King's The Trials and David Finnigan's Scenes from the Climate Era. Together, the plays examine the moral, political and personal consequences of climate change-and what responsibility one generation bears for the world it leaves to the next.
