Flinders Drama Centre will once again tread the boards this Adelaide Fringe season, bringing two exciting productions to the Holden Street Theatres in early March.
Gender-bending true crime: The Trouble With Harry
Based on the case of Eugenia Falleni, a migrant worker who lived as a man, Harry Crawford, before being convicted of his wife Annie's murder, The Trouble With Harry revisits a story shaped as much by fear of gender nonconformity as by crime itself.
Written by Lachlan Philpott and directed by Kiara Skene, the play reflects on a time in twentieth-century Australia that exposed deep anxieties around gender and social order and asks how narratives are constructed and who is authorised to tell them.
While the play has previously been seen in Belfast, Melbourne and Sydney, Flinders Drama Centre's production will mark the first time a trans actor - emerging South Australian performer Karma Duffield - has played the titular role of Harry Crawford/Eugenia Falleni.
"Casting trans actor Karma Duffield in the central role is a considered artistic decision that foregrounds lived experience and agency, reframing the story through a contemporary lens of identity, power, and representation," says Flinders University's Drama Centre Manager Dr Christopher Hurrell.
Karma will lead the cast in a performance that resists sensationalism and instead centres complexity, humanity, and lived perspective.
"I love the respect this play shows for the truth of the story. It doesn't claim to have all the facts or the answers but offers questions and invites the audience into holding multiple perspectives at once," says Karma.
"I am honoured to be the first transgender man inhabiting the titular role of Harry Crawford, bringing an authentic perspective to a dark piece of Australian history.
The Trouble With Harry premieres at The Barbara Hardy Garden at Holden Street Theatres on Tuesday 3 March, running for six performances. For tickets and information: https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/the-trouble-with-harry-af2026
Coming of age in the internet age: Virgins and Cowboys
Following critically acclaimed productions at Melbourne's Theatre Works and Sydney's Griffin Theatre, Adelaide audiences will finally get the chance to experience Morgan Rose's Virgins and Cowboys - a dangerous and unapologetic bon voyage to the patriarchy.
A sitcom-reject set in cyberspace, the story sees a 20-something dude stuck in a dead-end job who meets two women online, both of whom are virgins. As he sets out on a bizarre self-assigned mission to 'be the one who…', the internet, the past, the future, and the stage smash together and everything crumbles around him.
This twisted and timely premise is used to examine a demographic of people spat out of the other end of the information age - those in a futile and relentless pursuit of happiness.
Combining Morgan Rose's darkly comedic social commentary with the innovative and stylish direction of Adelaide director Anthony Nicola, Virgins and Cowboys launches the careers of six exciting new South Australian performers, all Honours students of the Flinders University Drama Centre.
Director Anthony Nicola is a queer, Greek-Cypriot theatre maker, Flinders Drama Centre graduate and the former Resident Director at State Theatre Company South Australia.
"I just love that we are presenting Morgan's grimly funny satire on the commodification of young lives in the internet age, in a converted 19th century church," says Nicola.
"And I love that it's being made with a graduating cohort who are almost uncannily perfect for it. These are performers coming of age in real time – hyper-literate in internet culture, deeply aware of how identity is curated, branded, and performed, and brave enough to interrogate that on stage.
They understand instinctively what it means to grow up inside competing narratives about success, desire, gender, and selfhood – because they're living it."
Virgins and Cowboys premieres at The Arch at Holden Street Theatres on Tuesday 3 March, running for six performances. For tickets and information: https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/virgins-and-cowboys-af2026
