After a successful season at the 2025 Adelaide Fringe Festival, Dr Christopher Hurrell took some time to tell us about the realities of managing a world-class Drama Centre. He told us all about the emerging new Golden Age for the Drama Centre, and why the 1990s at Flinders were full of inspiration for him.

As Manager of the Drama Centre, what does an average day look like for you?

There’s no such thing as an average day in the Drama Centre really. Since I stepped in as Manager in 2021, we have been on a relentless mission to reconnect the Drama Centre to its historic mission, which is to provide world-class, research-led professional training for actors, directors and theatre-makers. This means a focus on innovation, new ideas, and new projects.

I am in a constant cycle of teaching, designing new classes and topics, programming productions and other projects, and developing project plans, budgets, and schedules. At any given time, the focus of that work is inflected by whichever step in our strategic plan is currently foremost.

Tell us a little about the Flinders productions as part of the Adelaide Fringe.

Our participation in the Fringe is the implementation of the final stage of our overhaul of our Honours programme. We want students to begin the creation of their Honours portfolio by learning how to contribute to the original creative practice of leading professional artists. This helps improve their employability, and by the end of the year, they’ve progressed to creating new works themselves, that are both highly original and of a professional standard.

The Fringe should be a place for boldness and experimentation, and for the Drama Centre, it should be about engaging more actively with the South Australian public by getting off-campus and into the Fringe community.

So we created two new bespoke productions for the unique venues of our partner Holden Street Theatres:

• The world premiere of Gull by Glace Chase for The Arch, the historic former All Saints Anglican Church of Thebarton, built in 1850. The play is radical revisioning of post-Shakespearean gender-bending romantic comedy, and so we created a production in which the venue itself become the set for the production, evoking a Restoration-era playhouse.
• The South Australian premiere of First Love is the Revolution by Rita Kalnejais, which is a punk take on Romeo and Juliet, in which the protagonists are a teenage boy and an urban fox! With its cast of chickens, moles, foxes and cats, the students, led by the inaugural graduate of the Bachelor of Performance – Directing, Hannah Smith, created a production for Holden Street’s outdoor courtyard venue, The Barbara Hardy Garden, in which the location’s dialogue between the run-down church manse and the overgrown garden became the central metaphor in the production.

But this wasn’t enough for us, and I am constantly looking for new and different ways for the students to learn, so we also staged two additional performances:

• Thanks to our partners GWB Theatres at the historic Queens Theatre in the city, our visiting playwright in residence Glace Chase gave a one-off sneak preview performance of her new work Glace’s Big Things for our students and the general public.
• The recreation of the 2024 performance Dance Nation by Claire Barron, under the leadership of Hannah Smith. It gave our third-year students the opportunity to learn the disciplines of recreating a performance, and doing a longer run, by reviving the production on campus for inclusion in the Fringe during O Week, including a pop-up performance at the International Students Orientation Welcome Event.

The students are passionate and tireless, and their creative growth over a few short years is phenomenal.

Prior to teaching, you have experience as a director and received your PhD in 2019 – how have you found yourself in both academia and the creative arts?

The simple answer to this is that my unusual hybrid career is a direct result of the unique training I myself received at the Drama Centre. The commitment here to not simply train professional practitioners who can fit into existing employment opportunities, but to shape innovative, creative minds who master the challenging combination of professional expertise, intellectual rigour, and critical and creative thinking, means that it is possible for our graduates to have all sorts of surprising careers, marked by the ability to lead, and create work not just do work.

This was evident to me almost as soon as I arrived in Sydney, the year after I graduated. The way we think and create at the Drama Centre, which we take to be the bread and butter of our profession, marks us out as special in the national context.

Within two years of graduating, I was Literary Manager of the famed Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney, responding to the work of the country’s leading playwrights, and collaborating with them to push their creative practice into new territory. Not long after, I was directing the world premiere productions that emerged from that creative dialogue.

I tell you this story with no fear of self-aggrandizement because it is not a story about any special qualities of me, but about the extraordinary training I received at the Drama Centre. My training meant that I could understand and contribute at a relatively young age to the creative processes of the leading artists in the country.

Who inspires you?

Well, in the context of what I’ve just said, it won’t be surprising that major inspirations to me have been the staff I encountered here as a student in the 1990s. Outstanding teachers are everything, and I was fortunate to be a student at the height of another Golden Era when an extraordinary group of academics and practitioners, led by Professor Julie Holledge were collaborating together to do something special.

My experience of being a student here was that my brain was exploded with new ideas and new insight on what seemed like a weekly basis. It was transformative, and everything good that has happened to me professionally is thanks to the experience I had here. I set myself the goal of nothing less than providing as valuable an experience for the next generation of South Australian artists.

After I graduated, and again thanks to the training, I got to further my development as a director by working with my heroes, icons of Australian theatre, including, Gale Edwards AM, Jim Sharman, John Bell AO, Wayne Harrison AM and playwrights such as Debra Oswald, Justin Fleming and Glace Chase. One of the most moving things to me about my work as Drama Centre Manager, is the opportunity it has afforded me to share those sources of inspiration with the current generation of South Australian students. In the last three years we have brought all of these legendary artists into the life of the Drama Centre through productions and learning events.

How do you spend your spare time?

When I have some, I’ll let you know!