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.

The masterclass with Benedict Andrews connects the season’s directors with an artist whose career began at Flinders and in Adelaide before expanding to major international stages. Having staged productions of Óresteia at Iceland’s National Theatre and Electra/Persona at London’s National Theatre, Andrews will use the Wal Cherry Lecture to consider how theatre mirrors the world, returns to inherited stories and transforms them for contemporary audiences.

Following the lecture, Andrews will be joined in conversation by Matthew Lutton OAM, Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival.

Dr Christopher Hurrell, Manager of Flinders Drama Centre, says the season invites students to approach theatre as an art form that is still being invented. “Our students are originating work, directing their peers and finding their own relationship to some of the most distinctive writing in contemporary theatre. Each production asks them to establish its own theatrical logic, test ideas with collaborators and take responsibility for the experience they create for an audience,” says Dr Hurrell.

“Across the different year levels, students are asking how theatre can respond to the world their generation is inheriting. Benedict’s return extends that exploration. His masterclass gives our emerging directors an opportunity to test their questions against a career spent continually reconsidering what theatre can be.”

• Wrestling with Tomorrow: Created and performed by Flinders Drama Centre’s graduating Honours ensemble, at Drama Centre Rehearsal Room, Adelaide Festival Centre; November 11 and 12 at 7.30pm; November 13 at 5.30pm.

• Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. by Alice Birch: November 26 at 7.30pm; November 27 at 2pm and 7.30pm; November 28, 7.30pm, Flinders Drama Centre Rehearsal Room, Bedford Park.

• Prefix by Howard Barker – World Premiere: December 2, 3 and 5 at 7.30pm; December 4, 2pm, Matthew Flinders Theatre, Bedford Park.

• The Trials by Dawn King – Australian Premiere: November 25-27, 7.45pm, Flinders Drama Centre Dance Studio, Bedford Park.

• Scenes from the Climate Era by David Finnigan: December 2-4, 7.45pm, Flinders Drama Centre Dance Studio, Bedford Park.

• 2026 WAL CHERRY LECTURE – Benedict Andrews: Presented by Assemblage Centre For Creative Practice Research and the Helpmann Academy, December 4, 6.15pm, Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.