What’s on in Adelaide on a Thursday night

Friday is crowded and expensive. Saturday is worse. Thursday is the night the city is actually pleasant to be in, and almost nobody uses it properly.

We are obviously not neutral here, since we run a show on a Thursday. But the case stands up without us. Thursday in the Adelaide CBD gets you shorter queues, easier parking, better service, and a much better chance of walking into somewhere without booking three weeks ahead. Here is how to build an evening out of it.

Start with food, not drinks

The CBD's eating precincts are genuinely good and considerably calmer mid-week. Gouger Street, Rundle Street and the East End, Leigh and Peel Streets, and the Adelaide Central Market precinct all run at a manageable pace on a Thursday. You can generally get a table. On a Friday you generally cannot.

The practical advantage is timing. If you eat at seven you can be somewhere else by eight, which is what makes a Thursday work as a full evening rather than just dinner.

Theatre and live performance

The Adelaide Festival Centre and Her Majesty's Theatre both programme through the week, covering theatre, comedy, music and touring productions. Thursday performances are common and tend to be easier to get seats for than the weekend.

Smaller venues around the city run comedy and live music midweek as well. Programmes change constantly, so check individual venues rather than trusting a list, including this one.

Something with an activity attached

The problem with a straight drinks night is that it puts all the work on the conversation. Anything with a structure to it works better, especially for a group that does not know each other well.

Board game venues, mini golf bars, arcade bars and karting all operate in and around the CBD, and midweek is when they are actually usable rather than packed. The Lost Dice on King William Street sits in this category and then some: three floors, a library of over 650 board games, a full kitchen and bar, and a games shop.

Live magic

Adelaide has a genuinely strong magic scene for a city its size, and a lot of it runs midweek. Adelaide Magic Theatre stages close-up magic in the city, which is the kind performed at arm's length where you can watch someone's hands the whole time and still not catch it. It works particularly well as a date or a small group night.

Or a ghost show

This is the part where we declare an interest. HAUNTED runs every Thursday from 8pm to 9pm at The Lost Dice. Kevin Kopfstein, a Scottish storyteller and magician, brings out objects from his collection of haunted and accursed relics, tells you their histories, and then the room stops behaving.

It is an hour long, it is for adults, and it relies on atmosphere rather than gore or anything jumping out. The Show & Meal Deal at $74 per person bundles it with a burger or pizza, a drink and the board games, which is the version most people book because it turns the whole night into one decision instead of four.

The ghost tour option

If you want the outdoor version, Adelaide has a well-established dark tourism trade: ghost tours and paranormal investigations at the Adelaide Gaol, tours of Z Ward at the old Glenside asylum, and night walks through West Terrace Cemetery. These mostly run Friday and Saturday rather than Thursday, so check dates before you plan around them.

A workable Thursday

6:00pm Finish work, head into the CBD while parking is still easy
7:00pm Eat. If you have booked the meal deal, this is when you need to be at the venue
8:00pm A show, an hour long, done properly
9:00pm One drink and an argument about what you just saw
10:00pm Home, at a reasonable hour, on a school night

That is the whole argument for Thursday. You get a real night out and you are still functional on Friday.

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