Burrowed in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, in a cool spot of shade among the plane trees under the hot summer sun, is a strange new addition: a circular wooden building created to snuggly fit 110 audience members. Above the front door, a sign welcomes us to the “Wandering Hall of Possibility”, and beyond it, a small crew is working on the finishing touches.
This is the theatre and the set for A Concise Compendium of Wonder: a trilogy of shows from Adelaide’s Slingsby Theatre Company. Each work is adapted from the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde, spread out over millennia, from a medieval Europe devastated by famine to a moon colony on the last day of the year 3099. The trilogy can be watched as three standalone pieces, or together as a triptych, with the theatre transforming for each performance as the same three actors take the audience on three very different but beautifully intertwined stories.
Slingsby have been making work for young people and their families for 20 years: stories that “speak to the future adult in the eight-year-old, and … the child that still exists in the 80-year-old”, the company’s artistic director Andy Packer says.
The Childhood Of The World follows two children who have to make their way in the woods. Photograph: Eyefood
Fairytales – reinterpretations, or brand new fairytales for today – have always been at the heart of Slingsby’s work. They deal with magic and imagination, but also with death, loss, grief and loneliness – children who are thrust into dark situations and must find their way out. Their theatrical spaces are immersive and thick with wonder. In Adelaide, Emil and the Detectives was staged in an abandoned theme park, while Man Covets Bird had the audience sitting on a floor of real grass inside the theatre.
There is a sense of magic, and like the Brothers Grimm or HC Andersen, death always lurks just around the corner (the New York Times described their first show as “bleakly whimsical”). Slingsby speaks to its young audience as mature collaborators: understanding their world can be filled with pain, disappointment, struggling to find yourself. But always with a sense of optimism: you will find good and kind people; you have the strength within you to mark your own path forward.
Now, after tours that have crossed Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, A Concise Compendium of Wonder will be the company’s last work – and Packer says they are “investing everything we had in the bank”. After the premiere season in Adelaide, the trilogy will spend three weeks in Whyalla on the Eyre Peninsula ahead of further touring. And then Slingsby will be no more.
A moment in The Giant’s Garden, written by author Ursula Dubosarsky. Photograph: Eyefood
The trilogy wasn’t meant to be the company’s final work. In 2023, while in development, Slingsby found out it had yet again been denied multi-year funding from Creative Australia. Although the company does receive multi-year state funding, it last held federal multi-year funding in 2016, and has spent the past 10 years being “incredibly entrepreneurial and trying all sorts of different ways to be sustainable”. After this third rejection, Packer says, “we realised we’d come to the end of that”.
Government arts funding should be increased, says Packer – but he also feels artists should be mindful of how much they are personally investing into the work, the countless unpaid and underpaid hours put into making a show. Artists and companies, he says, “have a responsibility to go, ‘Am I just in a hamster wheel here?’”
Beyond A Concise Compendium, Packer says Slingsby will no longer be financially able to take the creative risks he wants. “[That] leaves you with no other choice other than to say, well, let’s go out in a beautiful fashion.” And so, with three final works – and a purpose-built, travelling theatre – the company will do just that.
The Giant’s Garden follows children who have been banished from a garden they love. Photograph: Eyefood
Creating this trilogy was a different process for Slingsby. Instead of working with playwrights, they commissioned short stories from leading Australian authors Ceridwen Dovey, Ursula Dubosarsky and Jennifer Mills. The three each adapted a different fairytale, asking very contemporary questions about nature and climate: topics that had arisen during Slingsby’s school workshop program, where children kept returning to climate anxiety or “a sense of impending doom for the future”.
Mills’s The Childhood of the World follows two children, carted away from their town deep in famine, who find their own way in the woods. Dubosarsky’s The Giant’s Garden follows children who have been banished from a garden they love. And in Dovey’s The Tree of Light, an elder of “the Moonfolk” – a girl of 12 – tells a story in front of the moon’s last remaining tree.
A scene from The Tree Of Light. Photograph: Eyefood
Like all Slingsby shows, the three works end on a hopeful note. “I want to take the audience into the darkness, but I don’t want to leave them there,” Packer says. “I want to lead the audience back to a sense of hope – hope for themselves and hope for the people that they live amongst and around.”
The show also addresses their young audiences’ climate concerns: any tour for Concise Compendium will transport the set only via land or sea, and when Slingsby closes the doors for the last time, they will pass the hall on to have another life with other companies or festivals before finally the building materials can be recycled.
Packer, who has been Slingsby’s artistic director since it was founded in 2007, admits to “a sense of sadness that this is the last big journey that we’ll take together”
“It didn’t have to be this way, but that’s where we’re at and I’m really proud of the decision that we’ve made,” he says. “That allows us to not be too worried about the future, but instead be very focused on what’s happening right here and right now.”