People have been singing together for as long as there have been people to sing: at weddings, at funerals, and on a cold Tuesday night in a draughty hall for no better reason than it helps. Choirs are nothing new. They just have a habit of turning up when they’re needed.
Aidan Fennessy’s The Heartbreak Choir begins in a weathered CFA hall on the edge of a regional town, where five locals have gathered to sing. They’ve broken away from the old choir over a matter of principle, and they now have a new name, a gig booked at short notice, and a bottle of local Sangiovese to settle the nerves. The harmonies take a while to come back.
What follows is very funny, and then, without much warning, it isn’t. Grief sits underneath the comedy, along with the question of how a handful of people hold each other up when life strikes the wrong chord. It’s a play about second chances and the small, stubborn ways people show up for one another, wrapped in dry wit and a cappella Australian pop, and it earns its laughs before it asks anything of you.
There’s a reason it lands the way it does. Fennessy, one of the most admired writers in Australian theatre and a former associate director at Melbourne Theatre Company, died in 2020, and The Heartbreak Choir was the last play he finished. It premiered at MTC without him. Knowing that changes very little about how the play works on a night out – it’s far too good-humoured for that – but it does explain the quality of attention it pays to ordinary people at difficult moments.
The cast for the Adelaide season is entirely South Australian: Emma Beech, Lucia Rose Franks, Genevieve Mooy, Billie-Rose Russell, Mark Saturno, Darcy Wain and the incomparable Libby O’Donovan. Director Shannon Rush, Artistic Associate at State Theatre Company South Australia, brings more than 20 years of directing, performing, producing, dramaturgy and education to it, with The Glass Menagerie, Housework, Starweaver and Cathedral among her credits.
“Aidan Fennessy understood what makes the heart tick, and The Heartbreak Choir is a beautiful comedy dedicated to community and the uplifting joy of music, and the need for people to come together,” Rush says. “I can’t wait to get into the rehearsal room with this bunch of talented South Australian performers and finish the year on a high note.”
It’s deliberate programming for late November, when the year is winding down and everyone is tired. State Theatre Company South Australia’s Petra Kalive calls it “the perfect way to end the year – tender, funny and full of heart. It’s a celebration of community, resilience and the simple act of singing together.”
Which is what a choir is for, in the end. Nobody joins one just because they’re a good singer. They join because the hall is warm, the company is decent, and for two hours on a weeknight the noise of everything else drops away. Anyone who has stood in a back row counting themselves in will recognise these five immediately, and anyone who hasn’t may find themselves looking up their local on the way home.
The Heartbreak Choir
by Aidan Fennessy
20 November – 5 December 2026
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
Tickets: statetheatrecompany.com.au
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