REVIEWS

The play is witty, funny and has some great dance moves. Unsurprisingly, as Day, Dombay and Hosie are each credited as co-creators and writers, the artists are well-cast and portray each of their characters as believable twenty-something housemates.

The Island of Misfit Players have approached Saint Joan with a level of respect and earnestness that felt refreshing to me; with no urge to modernise or reimagine the script, what they have achieved is an excellent, straightforward adaptation of the play while still maintaining a very personal stamp on their interpretation.

Ian Stenlake is a great choice for the role of our unsuspecting hero, Richard Hannay. Lisa McCune is a talented actor: charming as the foreign spy, highly amusing as the farmer’s wife, and fabulous as Hannay’s love interest. Casting The Umbilical Brothers is a great idea; the duo is an experienced comedy partnership, which means that Collins and Dundas are very capable of improvising and working hard to see if they can each ‘corpse’ their fellow artists.

The Natural Horse is a deeply strange play, in more ways than one. A dark comedy about an ex-Soviet family and their struggles with the American dream, it's a work with a lot of lofty concepts and low-brow comedy, much of which is achieved with a scrappy heart that I appreciated.

Director / scriptwriter, India Rose has assembled a stellar cast to deliver her powerful autobiographical unflinching script that addresses what it means to live with this unseen disability. All in a mere sixty minutes.

A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen made for heartwarming theatre. Its soulful unfolding is a testimony to the transformative power of stories, especially the ones we relish and rely on for the sustenance of our selfhood.

A black comedy tackling the complexities of family, relationships, housing, and child rearing, The Platypus utilises its genre-bending format to unpack our cultural biases and ask uncomfortable questions.

BATSHIT is, well, batshit. It’s a theatrical fever dream, giving a little burlesque, a little verbatim, a little mixed media, and a lot of comedy.

Back to Bilo’s painstaking efforts in amplifying the refugee story with so much attention to detail are praiseworthy. It is a necessary Australian story. One that needs to traverse terrains and timelines  across the continent to the enduring hum of humanity.

It’s not always easy to balance sharp political and social commentary with genuinely entertaining theatre, but Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys manages to do just this, delivering a show that’s just as laugh-out-loud funny as it is emotionally biting and politically urgent. Making its Brisbane debut at QPAC after a string of sell-out seasons and critical acclaim in Australia and the US, this queer black-comedy offers a gripping interrogation of the pervasive cultures of misogyny and toxic masculinity in private boys’ schools (and beyond).

Great art happens when the artist is willing and able to externalise the most true and human parts of themselves on stage for an audience. Chatter is absurd, funny, confronting, and feels deeply real and undeniably honest. It is a compelling rollercoaster of an hour that loops through the silly and sad with a deft artistic hand and slick sound and lighting design. I only wish that I had been able to review this show at the start of its season, so I could have told everyone I know that they simply had to see it.

Chimera Arts has created a bold new work that explores the ways in which our lives are often closely inter-connected, and the potential of that social network. The use of ‘100 metres of chunky yarn’ is a clever device to reinforce messages about connection, and about the unravelling of power, represented through the excellent set design, and in the ways in which the artists gradually tear down the barriers and emerge from underneath the pieces. 

“When you don't allow phones suddenly an audience is more engaged. They're less self-conscious and artists are given sort of a pass to do things that they normally wouldn't feel comfortable doing otherwise if it was recorded…”

Props to the producers, as they’ve assembled one of the hottest team of carnies to hit a stage in Magandjin for some time, bring tricks rarely scene in our corner of the world.

I witnessed empowering moments of redemption when the ensemble flipped the script in two distinct ways. In an act of subversion, the lampshade was treated as a microphone and the closet morphed into a stage the women could stand on top of and verbalise their sentiments.

There were so many excellent moments in Le Retour, but one special highlight for me was contortionist and foot archery artist, Shannen Michaela, who performed her spectacular and technical archery act. The crowd was blown away by the acts, how she was able to set the scene, with accompanying epic music, as well as her charisma and perfect execution.

Without spoiling too much, it was an enchanting blend of artistry, music, and acrobatics that was sensual, whimsical, intense, and dangerous. If you fancy a ride into a sinister and sexy circus netherworld that will leave your heart pounding, then ‘Limbo-The Return’ is the perfect show for you.

Super entertaining, very festival-y in its novelty, and by far the best boat trip I’ve had down the Maiwar (Brisbane River).

I found that the inclusion of movement added so much to the experience of this work. The acrobats were able to bring the more abstract, mystical, violent, grotesque, glimmering elements of Dido and Aeneas’ world to life. Each and every member of the company (both acrobat and singer) brings a level of virtuosity to their work that reminds one why these forms have lasted the test of time.

The three acrobats are the stars of this exceptional show that features incredible hand balance by Daniel O’Brien, a fluid and moving straps solo (and acrobatic ‘dance’) by Kimberley Rossi, and quite amazing strength work by Zac Stephens. In just over 60 minutes, the performers demonstrated their mastery of circus arts to create moments of beauty, strength, power, fear, tenderness, pain, humour, wistfulness, joy, and connection.