Social media is a language. Those you speak it will appreciate the authenticity of the early scenes of Lewis Treston’s IRL, which sees 17-year-old Alexei (Will Bartolo), back and forthing in messenger conversation with his closeted internet crush Thaddeus (Byron Lankester Howells), complete with the awkwardness and overthinking insecurity the manifests itself in any such…
This exhilarating hip-hop musical from Queensland Theatre is a huge crowd-pleaser, ending the year of productions on a high note. Set immediately post-Vietnam predominantly in a refugee camp in Arkansas, U.S.A., with flashbacks to Saigon, Vietgone is written by Qui Nguyen (who’s since gone on to write for Disney animation projects since penning this in…
Australian author Trent Dalton is probably best known for his bestselling debut Boy Swallows Universe which has now also been adapted for TV for Netflix. That book, and the one that followed, All Our Shimmering Skies, was narrated by a teenager, so it is perhaps no surprise that his latest book Lola in the Mirror,…
Shake & Stir’s adaption of Mary Shelly’s classic gothic horror novel Frankenstein is thrilling in both pace and spectacle. From its beginning, the company leans into the scale and theatrical potential of the epic story of young scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a sentient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The colossal storytelling starts aboard…
This uplifting Queensland Theatre production of Melanie Tait’s successful play-turned film is a very entertaining and fun trip to the theatre. It manages to evoke lots of laughs while also pressing a few salient buttons regarding Australians’ stubbornness about, and suspicion of change. At one point, one of the older women says, ‘We don’t even…
When depressed, we are urged to remember that things get better for there are many brilliant things about the world… at least a million according to our unnamed narrator’s hopeful list. It his list of these that is the central premise of Every Brilliant Thing … a list of everything worth living for, first compiled…
What is your anthem? It’s an early question that not only leaves audience members pondering, but sums up the central premise of Shake and Stir’s uplifting new work, Tae Tae in the Land of Yaaas!, appearing as part of Brisbane Festival. More than a favourite tune, a person’s anthem is a theme song declaration of…
The best storytelling comes from showing not telling… that is using action (or lack of, as the case may be) to reveal the emotions intended to be interpreted by the audience. Awareness of this is at the core of Hannah Belanszky’s mainstage debut work Don’t Ask What the Bird Look Like from its very outset…
David Eldridge’s well-written two-hander Beginning has a runtime of 1 hour 40 minutes, without interval. Yet its story appears to fly by in what seems like the shortest of times, such is its well-written script of witty, but also honest banter of two singles, drawn together at a party’s end. It is in intimate real…
Symbolic contrasts abound within The Curators’ stylish production of Angela Betzien’s Children of the Black Skirt, starting from its initial folly of youthful frolic and then soon-after stark at-attention responses of children in-fear. This establishes both the aesthetic sophistication and the narrative premise of the now-iconic work which is set in an abandoned orphanage that…
