Last night Jane Howard went to see Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a punk cabaret retelling of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, in which snippets of Coleridge’s text are woven into a production with songs by The Tiger Lillies and visuals from Mark Holthusen.

It’s a nice idea – but less than the sum of its parts, concludes Jane, who has some issues with the design, which looks beautiful but effectively cuts of the performers from the audience, and with the Tiger Lillies’ repertoire. You can read her two-star review in full here. Or you can catch an extract below.

The Tiger Lillies tell their story directly to the audience, sometimes as the mariner himself, sometimes as outsiders looking in on the tale. Slow piano plays under The Storm, a jaunty accordion features in Cabin Boys, a haunting theremin in Albatross 3. But over the 90 minutes, the musical range begins to feel limited, with songs featuring the same rhythms and emotional beats as the songs that came before.

As they perform, The Tiger Lillies stand behind a scrim, in front of a screen onto which Mark Holthusen’s animated visuals are projected. This three-layered approach imitates an old toy theatre, with screens and props carefully flown in and out. At other times this tribute disappears and snow or fire appear to consume the stage and hide the band away.

The Canadian theatre-maker brings a new incarnation of his show Needles & Opium to the festival this weekend. Jana Perkovic caught up with him to discuss revisiting old vices, theatre as therapy, and being in competition with Netflix. You can find the whole interview here, or read an extract below.

Needles & Opium, the work Lepage is bringing to the Adelaide festival, is a reworking of one of his early shows, which cemented his reputation when it premiered in 1991. It connects the lives of Miles Davis and Jean Cocteau with a third, Lepage-like character, going through a break-up while in a hotel room in Paris. “It’s basically about dependence in many aspects: opium, alcohol, love. Addiction often tries to fill a hole. I’m playing with three characters who have experienced loss.”

He refers to the work as a ‘break-up story’. “If you’re going to do a show about somebody who dumped you, it’s much richer if you have three characters dealing with different aspects of that theme. There is more space for people to identify with it.”

Lepage believes that young artists often bump into important and interesting themes early in their career, when they are not fully prepared to deal with them artistically. “I felt there were many unturned stones, many things left unsaid, because I didn’t have the experience, the maturity, to fully understand them.”

But the other important impetus in returning to Needles & Opium was to rework the design into something more three-dimensional. The original work had a single performer standing in front of a screen. Now, Lepage believes, the work is simply more fleshed out: “We have more performers, more scenes. It’s more sensuous, more three-dimensional, the scenography is more fleshed out, the story more developed.”

Today is our last day of live coverage from Adelaide – although we’ll slip in a couple of extra reviews tomorrow morning. Guardian Australia’s Alicia Canter has been taking pictures of the festival all week. You can find a gallery of her favourite images from the festival here, and have a look at some below.

Jana Perkovic headed off to Tuxedo Cat for fringe theatre performed on treadmills. Happily the audience gets to sit still. She finds it engrossing but rather one note. (That note presumably being the slap of trainer on treadmill). You can read Jana’s three-star review in full here, or read an extract below

The pace and length of the work are decided by the performers’ natural physical limits. The work stops when all three performers have literally collapsed on the ground, making terrifying gagging sounds. It is not so much that gender is performed in front of us; rather, the impossible quest to live up to normative standards is physicalised, and if it does not quite work as metaphor, it certainly works as a showcase of endurance.

There is glitter. Dance routines to Spandau Ballet. A bad case of acid-wash denim. An ewok. Who in their right mind wouldn’t enjoy an evening at Windmill’s ode to losers, School Dance. The second in their trilogy of coming-of-age stories, this is a joyful romp around the horrors of being a teenager, approached with massive warmth and sincerity. Its success lies, obviously, in its soundtrack. But also in its complete lack of cynicism. It holds a mirror to the best bits of teenage life too: the friendships, the emotions, the lack of real-world experience.

You can read my four star review of the show in full here. Or here’s a taster.

The performances are fantastic, the chemistry between the boys believable and compelling, and there’s some frankly brilliant dancing in evidence. Not least in a finale that has every audience member grinning from ear-to-ear. It must have been so tempting to make School Dance more palatable; less geeky. But that is its joy and what makes it real: this is all the awkwardness of First Kiss, with none of the giddily beautiful hipster snogging. So like real teenage life then.

We’ve written a bit about Four Rooms, an exhibition at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute here in Adelaide, but Alex Needham has been exploring it in more depth. He’s been talking to James Luna, an American performance artist who is collaborating with Australian artist Jenny Fraser. Both are Indigenous people from opposite shores of the Pacific –Luna is from Orange, California where he lives on the La Jolla reservation, and Fraser is from Mareeba in Queensland.. The pair’s “room” – that is the central conceit of the show – considers that expanse of water.

Alex sat down and chatted to Luna about his collaboration with Fraser, and the pair’s shared ocean. You can read his feature in full here, and catch an extract below.

In Luna’s experience, Indigenous people from to two continents also share a laugh. “When we meet each other there’s this wonderful sense of humour, and the humour is a survival skill. I’ve been quoted as saying dammit, if you can’t laugh at it then you’re gonna be depressed, so even though it might be painful, someone will crack a joke just to break the ice and keep moving on and I like to put that in my work as well. Also there’s a story there for all people in terms of survival, difference, acceptance, outlook.

“I truly believe that all the strife in the world is caused by miscommunication and ignorance,” he adds. “But it’s not quite that simple because we need to rewrite history as it was written. It didn’t surprise me to go to Brighton Beach and see a big statue to the explorer that discovered Australia. It galls me, because how can you discover a culture that’s been there for thousands and thousands of years? As an artist, I can’t change the way people think but I can get some people to reconsider.”

Alex Needham has been at some kind of musical marathon or other every night for the last week. (How is he going to react when faced with an evening that doesn’t require absolute concentration on sonic experimentation? I’m worried for him.) Last night it was John Zorn’s Classical Marathon, to which he gave a three-star review. You can read that review in full here or read and extract from it below

John Zorn is known for the remarkable breadth of his work – he has tackled everything from punk to opera – and on Wednesday the second of Adelaide festival’s four-night retrospective focused on his classical repertoire. It was performed in two halves, the first by the Brisbane-based Elision Ensemble and second by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra – both last seen in the Adelaide festival at Tectonics – and conducted by David Fulmer, who was hugged so hard by Zorn at the end that he nearly lost his balance.