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…
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…
An equally amusing and moving theatre work, Tiny Beautiful Things from Queensland Theatre grips the audience from the first minute to the last. A sparse domestic set design of kitchen, living room and stairs leading up to an unseen upper floor (courtesy of Simone Romaniuk) shows us the home of Sugar – a woman who’s…
Moving and at times confronting, At What Cost? leaves the audience in a stunned silence for a moment, until the thunderous applause and standing ovation inevitably follow. It’s a powerful piece of theatre in which the one hour and forty-five minutes without interval seem to fly by. Indigenous playwright, Nathan Maynard, has crafted a compelling,…
William Shakespeare’s light-hearted comedy As You Like It is one of the playwright’s most regarded pastoral plays. Before we get to the simple forest life of Queensland Theatre’s lively production, however, we are first opened to its treacherous duchy court, for all the world is, of course, a stage. The story is of Rosalind (Emma…
Queensland Theatre can’t go wrong opening its 2023 season with this entertaining and sometimes searing comedy-drama from the prodigious David Williamson (Emerald City, Don’s Party, The Removalists and many more). Family dynamics clash with topical politics and social issues in the tight, interval-free 90-minute play directed by Artistic Director, Lee Lewis (Prima Facie, Mouthpiece). Family…
The stakes are high from the outset of Queensland Theatre’s blockbuster season closer First Casualty. This is not just because of the play’s grounding in reality as the debut work from serving soldier and Afghanistan veteran Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Johnston CSC, but also because of its initial action. That sees Sapper “Thommo” Ken (Reagan Mannix)…
Part of Belloo Creative’s mission is to bring people and stories out of the shadows. Appropriately then, the female-led, award-winning company’s latest production, Boy, Lost covers the true story of one family’s loss and redemption. The years-in-the-making world premiere work has been adapted for the stage by Katherine Lyall-Watson from Kristina Olsson’s award-winning memoir. It…
Othello has long been one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays, but with its challenges comes great potential. That potential is realised in Queensland Theatre’s production, part of the 2022 Brisbane Festival program. It is an electric adaption that approaches the tragedy from a uniquely-Queensland perspective. Jimi Bani and Jason Klarwein inject Australian and Torres Strait Islander…
Eighteen-year-old Anna (Melissa Kahraman) has been on medication for so long she can’t remember who she is without it. Whereas once, as a little girl, she was a prodigious writing talent, able to fill hundreds of notebooks with imaginative stories, now her creativity appears lost to years of pills and prescriptions. She ponders if her…
