Neon Tiger | La Boite
What is really lovely about this is that it is a side of queer female liaisons that isn’t often shown. The soft, the gentle, the foolish.
BaBel | Backbone
A beautiful, rough, raw, crazy impossibility of show pulled together in two weeks, by international maestro Younes Bachir, a Belgium director renowned for creating amazing large-scale site-specific works.
La Silhouette | Sui Ensemble
Created by Brissie legends Sui Ensemble, this was a roller-coaster of thrills and spills and colourful mayhem, with a brutal message of home truths revealed layer by layer like a very dangerous game of pass the parcel.
Man with the Iron Neck | Joshua Bond & Legs on the Wall
Damn. This show. This fucking show. You must go and see this show.This show will kick you in the guts, leave you reeling from laughter and then breaking your heart multiple times.
Umami Mermaids | Anna Straker
The perfect piece to wander across at a festival, in a dark corner where you think there be rainbows and friendly creatures of the deep, but there are only ghouls and destruction and wanton betrayal, and slighted ladies who smell of seaweed and ageing fishes, who bide their time until they can wreak their delicious vengeance.
Biladurang | Joel Bray
The set is intimate. Obviously. The whole room is five meters by ten. We are offered terry-towelling robes and champagne. It is true, I have been to parties and illicit liaisons like this before, these same mundane walls, the art that becomes commonplace in these holding pens, these anonymous rooms where people stay when they are in-between places, meeting nameless others.
Hamnet | Dead Centre
Children. You cannot trust them. You cannot trust them to know the appropriate etiquette. They might ask you anything.
Ride | Backbone Ensemble
The nature of the tiny venues - the inside of a car - and the lively Saturday night timeslot - makes for an intimate confessional that has guest spilling secrets and demanding phone-jacks. The whole show has a feeling of risk, the kind of chance you take when you jump into a car with a stranger.
Love Letters to Fuckbois | Wightman & Stark
A simple premise: the two protagonists read out so-called love letters to men from their past, all the while discussed with just the right amount of wry humour as you would share over a bottle of cheap white with a girlfriend. The stories contain familiar faces and well-known archetypes we have ALL slipped into bed with. Regrets I've had a few, but maybe not so many as these lasses...
The Longest Minute | Robert Kronk & Nadine McDonald-Dowd
The show starts jovial, cheerful, giving a good Aussie ribbing to audience and players alike. But the skies are drawing in, and we are ultimately plunged into the deeply personal world of the Wright family, a tale of family life in the 80's and 90's, ever shaded by a dark cloud of racism and violence.
Wheel of Fortune | TAM Presents
The class commentary of the original remains firmly on the down low, and leaves you to make your judgements afterwards in the bar; the play sets the scene, but in this modern world of sexual promiscuity are there really any forbidden fruits to scandalize the punters?
Poison | Lot Vekemans
They paved the stage with woodchip and paths of white quartz. From the first step, the first crunch of the lily-white stones, I am transported to the quiet paths of cemeteries up and down the country, the courtyards of crematoriums.
Dinopocalypse | Ruckus Slam
What if dinosaurs did not die out in a mass extinction 65 million years ago and instead went underground and evolved over tens of millions of years into a vaguely humanoid species not too dissimilar from ourselves? And what if a catastrophic event drove them out of their homes and forced them to seek safety in our own and our government sought to contain them, both for their safety and for our own? And what would you do if you got a chance to visit the facility that contains them, at the launch of their dinosaur integration program?
A Rose Among Horns | Genevieve Butler
This is not a show for urban critics. This is a hoot of a show. It’s clever, and it’s complicated, but it’s also easy on the eye, and not so very hard to sing along. We already know how the story ends, after all.
There's Something About Mary(s ) | Cassie George
The songs are cleverly picked to provide an extra, often humorous layer to the story, while tugging at the nostalgia that often comes with music that we all know and love.
One the Bear | Black Honey Company
Decolonisation is an action, not an abstract concept. And it can be as simple as putting a new shape in an old box, a less-seen colour on a jaded set, a rarely-seen rhyme on a prestigious stage. Decolonisation is worthy work, but it doesn't have to feel worthy. It can feel like a whole lot of fun.
Betty Grumble | Sex Clown Saves The World
Adults only, take no prisoners, leave no lover behind; this fucked up take on cabaret literally starts in a tip and ends in a furnace. It is scandalous, it is shocking, it is… political? Totally political. It’s debonair, it’s filthy, it’s fucking weird. It’s proper wired.
I just came to say goodbye | The Good Room
The audience rippled with trepidation for a minute, when they said this was a lock in. That’s right, my friends, once you are in you must stay in. And if you leave you can not come back. A fitting physical metaphor for the unfurling darkness ahead.
The Bluebird Mechanicals | Too Close to the Sun
Time moves, stands still. The narrator tells us our future. She has something to say. She has gone to great trouble to craft the tale. She has come a long way to tell us the story. We had best listen.
Danger Ensemble | The Hamlet Apocalypse
This show gets it. It gets that Shakespeare is funny. It gets that it ought to mean something. It pokes fun of it, whilst taking itself seriously at the same time. It is committed to the original, even as it tears it apart with both hands. It gets that tragedy is a car-crash, that you can't tear your eyes away from.