Neil Armfield (Adelaide Festival)Neil Armfield is an Australian director of theatre, film, and opera.  He has directed for all of Australia’s state theatre companies, Opera Australia, The Welsh National Opera, The Bregenz Festival in Austria, Zurich Opera, Canadian Opera, Houston Grand Opera, English National Opera, The Lyric Opera in Chicago, and the Royal Opera House, London. He was co-founder of Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and was its Artistic Director for seventeen years. He was joint Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival with Rachel Healy from 2017 to 2023.

What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?

In 1970, when I was fourteen, the RSC toured Australia with two ravishing productions: John Barton’s Twelfth Night and Trevor Nunn’s The Winter’s Tale, with a company that included Donald Sinden as Malvolio, and Judi Dench as Viola/Hermione/Perdita. (It was one of the last performances in Sydney’s magnificent old Theatre Royal, destroyed the following year to make way for the MLC building.)

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

In 1972, aged seventeen, I directed my first production: Toad of Toad Hall at Homebush Boys’ High. The great Indigenous director Brian Syron was judging all school theatre productions in participating high schools across New South Wales. He met me in a classroom after the show and asked me if I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I said I thought I’d become a teacher. He said, ‘Because if you want to be a director, you know what you’re doing.’ That was all I needed.