Reviews

Glorious female harmonies resonate through the tiny black box theatre as Nine opens with the “Overture Dell Donne”, tantalizing the audience with the promise of a musically thrilling evening ahead. That promise is fulfilled in spades.

The visual tone is set too. Simple but striking, an upstage orchestra is seen, filtered through a scrim. Minimal props allow a large cast of talented women, stylishly dressed predominantly in black, with an occasional flash of white, to fill the stage, atmospherically lit by James Wallis

The classy Swing on This team show why they are festival faves – with a high-energy show in South Bank’s Spiegeltent, the ideal venue for this very cool show. With audience participation encouraged, it’s a perfect weekend kickstarter to get the Brisbane Festival up and running – and swinging in style! And what a start – grooving along to hits from the Sinatra canon – Mack the Knife, New York New York, That’s Life, One for my Baby (and one more for the road).

Darlington Theatre Players presented an evening of one act comedies as a prelude to their entries in Hills Fest and Youth Fest, both of which are also being held at Marloo Theatre.

While The Rupture has not been described as a work of ecofeminism, Chapter II brings Finucane’s work much closer to this realm. Here she makes strong links between patriarchal structures and the threat to the environment. Finucane opens the performance dressed as a fantastical ice queen, typical of her magic realism, and both the feminist and ecological messages are merged. This sequence speaks to the ways in which patriarchal ideology is often self-imposed by women and this is immediately juxtaposed with the destruction of Antarctic glaciers.